Winner of the 2017 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize

Winner of the 2019 Bernard Shaw Prize for its translation

At a run-down brothel in Caudal, Spain, the prostitutes are collecting stray dogs. Each is named after a famous male writer: Dante, Chaucer, Bret Easton Ellis. When a john is cruel, the dogs are fed rotten meat. To the east, in Barcelona, an unflappable teenage girl is endeavouring to trace the peculiarities of her life back to one woman: Alba Cambó, writer of violent short stories, who left Caudal as a girl and never went back.

Mordantly funny, dryly sensual, written with a staggering lightness of touch, the debut novel in English by Swedish sensation Lina Wolff is a black and Bolaño-esque take on the limitations of love in a dog-eat-dog world.

Prizes

Winner of The Bernard Shaw Prize 2019,Winner of Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2017

‘A book that you just want to give people and say: take a look at this, read it, experience it. I would have liked to devote the entire review to quoting sentences and paragraphs from the novel – it is almost as if that were the only way of adequately conveying the gravity, depth and lightness of Lina Wolff's prose, her tender yet pitiless character descriptions, her distinctive but also natural way of piecing together the novel's disparate parts into a shimmering whole.’

‘As a prose writer, Wolff amazes us once again with the rare ability to draw the reader straight in. There are authors that need to summon all their skill to describe the café around the corner. Others have it in their blood, unfair as that may seem.’

‘Lina Wolff's exuberance and narrative zest are exquisite. This is simply good writing.’

‘With linguistic precision Wolff highlights scents, flavours, sights, making the reading experience almost physical. The hot asphalt in Barcelona, the taste of wine or bodily fluids running down a thigh: everything is captured with a palpable sensuality.’

‘Wolff is reminiscent of Pedro Almodóvar, twisting and turning the gender roles, allowing women to shine and gain the upper hand.’

‘Wolff’s prose has a quality of “otherness” entirely in keeping with the surreal atmosphere of the novel. This strange, provocative debut sits well alongside the work of Roxane Gay, Katherine Angel, Maggie Nelson, Zoe Pilger and Miranda July . . . a cool, clever and fierce addition to the canon of modern feminist literature.’

‘[A] filmic offering . . . channelling the spirit of Pedro Almodóvar. A thoroughly invigorating novel.’ re

‘Oddly compelling . . . a European postmodern novel steeped in alienation and ennui.’

‘The author demonstrates a marvelous command of language and creates characters with real depth, lending the book a sensual vibe and an acerbic wit that force its emotional truths to rise above the grunge of its hard-boiled setting. A poetic, unsentimental drama that offers a meditation on love in all its disparate forms.’

‘Wolff has had enough of the big swinging dicks of masculine literature. [Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs is] clever and challenging and distinctive.’

‘Wolff manoeuvres with great skill through her breathtaking multitude of worlds and an equally impressive cast of characters. Bret Easton Ellis . . . takes the reader on a roller-coaster from the tragic to the comical, with hints of the mysterious and magical scattered in between – it is a testimonial of a dead person remarkably full of life.’

Lina Wolff has lived and worked in Italy and Spain. During her years in Valencia and Madrid, she began to write her short story collection Många människor dör som du (‘Many People Die Like You’; Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2009). Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, her first novel, was awarded the prestigious Vi Magazine Literature Prize and shortlisted for the 2013 Swedish Radio Award for Best Novel of the Year. She now lives in southern Sweden. Her second novel, De polyglotta älskarna (‘The Polyglot Lovers’), is forthcoming from Albert Bonniers Förlag in 2016. Frank Perry has translated the work of many of Sweden’s leading writers. His work has won the Swedish Academy prize for the introduction of Swedish literature abroad and the prize of the Writers Guild of Sweden for drama translation.