Tarantula
In 1984, Eduardo and his younger brother, living in exile for several years in the United States, travel back to their native Guatemala to participate in a Jewish children’s camp in a remote forest of the highland mountains. They no longer know their homeland. They barely speak the language. Their parents had insisted that they spend a few days at the camp to learn not only ways of survival in the wild, but also ways of survival in the wild for Jewish children. It’s not the same, they had been told. Upon their arrival, they are met with the promise of adventure. But early one morning, they are roused from bed and forced to play a sinister game they can’t afford to lose.
Many years later, Eduardo, now a father himself and living in Berlin, happens upon a former campmate in Paris who connects him to Samuel Blum—the counselor who kept a snake in his pocket, had what a young Eduardo took for a tarantula crawling down his arm, and offers no apologies for the camp’s disturbing methods.
In consultation with the author, Tarantula is translated from the Spanish by Daniel Hahn.
Prix Médicis Étranger Winner
Spanish Association of Literary Critics Premio de la Crítica Winner
Premio Finestres de Narrativa en Castellano Finalist
Prix Grand Continent Finalist
Spanish Booksellers Association Premio TodosTusLibros Finalist
Dua Lipa’s Service95 “Must-Read Books” selection
Jewish Book Council “Recommended Reading” selection
Observer “Paperback of the Week” selection
Blackwell’s “Best Paperback Translated Fiction” selection
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781954276574
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781954276567
Read an excerpt from Eduardo Halfon’s forthcoming Tarantula at Asymptote.
Eduardo Halfon is the author of The Polish Boxer, Monastery, Mourning, Canción, and Tarantula (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in May 2026). He is the recipient of the Guatemalan National Prize in Literature, International Latino Book Award, Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and Berman Literature Prize,among many other honors. A citizen of Guatemala and Spain, Halfon was born in Guatemala City, attended school in Florida and North Carolina, and has lived in Nebraska, Spain, Paris, and Berlin.
visit author page »Praise for Tarantula
This novel about a violent and traumatic childhood episode is eerily current—the questions it raises about identity, resistance, and history are both deeply personal and universal.
— Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night and Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave
An extraordinary book. What begins as a shocking story reveals itself as a sidelong, mysterious meditation on trauma, vengeance, and the terrible capacity of the past to shape the present.
— Olivia Laing, author of Crudo and The Silver Book
Chilling. A story set in the Guatemalan jungle that resonates in Gaza, in Donbas, anywhere victims end up resembling their own executioners.
— Santiago Roncagliolo, author of Red April
Wow. . . . Morally uneasy and extremely relevant, this is a book I suspect I’ll be thinking about for a while.
— Tyler Atwood, Bluebird & Co. (Crozet, VA)
Amazing!
— Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore (Spokane, WA)
With beautiful prose, storytelling verve, and detective-level inquisitiveness for what came before, Halfon exhumes the yesteryears of self and family. . . . [He] seems unafraid to root around in the darkness and his writing burns bright as a disinterring torch.
— Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books (Portland, OR)
As someone who lived through the twilight zone that was the civil war in Guatemala, I could not put this book down. It does an amazing job of exposing the uncanny situations that become the everyday when civilization collapses.
— Andrea Iriarte Dent, Molly’s Bookstore (Melrose, MA)