A primal tale of cruelty and redemption

The family farm has run to ruin. Rafael’s father has abandoned them. His older brothers, the twins Mauro and Joaquin, blame Rafael for their father’s departure and exact revenge on their baby brother. Steban, Rafael’s other sibling, is a simpleton whose affections and allegiances change with the shifting winds. Ruling over this dysfunctional roost is a tyrannical and avaricious mother.

There is nothing bucolic about existence on a dilapidated farm on the lonely Patagonian steppe. Life is ruthless, unforgiving, and bloody. As the family tensions mount, daily life degenerates into open warfare, revealing dark truths about the human soul.

For readers of Coetzee’s Disgrace, the writing of Dorothy Alison, and the southern gothic of William Faulkner, Nothing but Dust is a gripping, unsentimental, ultimately majestic story about life in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth.

Translated by: Alison Anderson