“The protagonists of this sweeping novel strive to piece together the past in all its cruelty to better understand themselves and whence they came. Austral juxtaposes beautifully the search for truth and the artistic process in a depiction that makes one indistinguishable from the other. With great sensitivity, Carlos Fonseca captures the sense of dislocation that comes to define anyone who has ever been displaced.”

—Alejandro Varela, author of The Town of Babylon

“In Austral, Fonseca has created a profoundly literary project: to search for the traces of that journey of no return to who we used to be, and to leave a free and joyful record of his unexpected findings discoveries.” —Alia Trabucco Zerán, author of The Remainder

“Austral is a tender and thoughtful exploration of the painful irony of being alive and our attempts to make sense of the past as well as the present. Carlos Fonseca has written a book that is like a beautiful maze where we can discover new treasures at each turn." —Katharina Volckmer, author of The Appointment

“A beautifully knotted novel which unfolds with every traced layer of its deeply affecting narrative along side a meditation on memory, mystery and vanishing. Sebaldian in its turns, Austral is a novel of profound questions." —Guy Gunaratne, author of Mister, Mister

"Carlos Fonseca is one of today's most promising Latin American novelists, and Austral—a reflection on identity, rootlessness and violence, written in admirable prose—is his most ambitious, most complex and most accomplished novel to date" —Javier Cercas, author of Even the Darkest Night

"[A] tour de force." —Booklist

"As a study of the confusions of history and the challenge of language to get the story right, it’s an admirably complex, intellectually searching work." —Kirkus Reviews