Living Things by Munir Hachemi

Living Things follows four recent graduates – Munir, G, Ernesto and Álex – who travel from Madrid to the south of France to work the grape harvest. Except things don’t go as planned: they end up working on an industrial chicken farm and living on a campsite, where a general sense of menace takes hold. What follows is a compelling and incisive examination of precarious employment, capitalism, immigration and the mass production of living things, all interwoven with the protagonist’s thoughts on literature and the nature of storytelling. A genre-bending and dystopian eco-thriller, Living Things is a punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, heralding an exciting new voice in international fiction. 

REVIEWS

"Startling, compulsive, and vibrant; Living Things reads like an ignition. The most honest thing I’ve read in a long time about being young and alive in a beautiful, horrible world."― Dizz Tate, author of Brutes

"A sinister, suspenseful novel, Living Things exposes how the biotech industry will take the foundations of life and mutilate them into things untrustworthy as triffids. Hachemi wrangles form itself, making a sci-fi of what is ultimately extremely quotidian and true: Frankenstein creatures created as fodder to feed an increasingly undernourished world, and the refracted suffering that upholds such a system, in which living things – worker, plant and animal – are made consumable parts in helix. Hachemi deftly lays bare the cannibalistic bent at the heart of global capitalism."― Abi Andrews, author of The Word for Woman is Wilderness

"Heady, diaristic and compulsively readable in Julia Sanches’s perfect translation, four reckless and stubborn college students get themselves caught in the hell of factory farming in Southern France. To say that Living Things is a superb eco-thriller is both true and yet falls short of just how magnificently unclassifiable Hachemi’s novel is."― Jacob Rogers, The Center for Fiction

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback with French flaps
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
ISBN: 978-1804270875
Pages: 120