CRIATURITA

María Bastarós' debut novel. Told through the eyes of a girl who clings to self-deception as her only lifeline, Criaturita fearlessly moves between rural thriller, family drama, coming-of-age novel, and the fantastic.

Kaira Santos lives in Aguasclaras, one of the little towns surrounding the Milagro valley. She is a young woman seeking love desperately, most likely to compensate for her father's disappearance, a biologist consumed by his search for a creature that roams Lake Milagro. With each failed relationship, Kaila falls into depressive states, stops eating and locks herself at home, undaunted by her mother's attempts to get her to eat and move forward. Everything changes when several women disappear around the lake. Kaila is convinced that her father was right about the monster and joins the searching parties. Until her own mother disappears...

Bastarós' style is brave, direct, raw, yet tender, sometimes cruel. Her fiction tackles topics such as horror, boredom and mental health as disruptive elements of reality. Let´s not forget the great importance of landscape, either murderous deserts or swallowing lakes, tiny rotting towns or gruelling big cities. Her main characters are invariably female, living in a constant alter state or self-deception and unable to confront their reality or changing the rules of their lives.

María Bastarós (Zaragoza, 1987) is an author, an art historian, a cultural manager and a screenwriter. Her first published work is Historia de España contada a las niñas (Fulgencio Pimentel, 2018), a hybrid of literature, pamphlet and journalistic chronicle. In 2021 she published the collection of short-stories No era a esto a lo que veníamos (Candaya, 2021), also published in the UK by Daunt books, that confirmed her as "An important, new voice in European literature." (Irish Times)