The International Library: Layla Martínez, Sophie Hughes, and Annie McDermott on Woodworm

This event has been postponed.

Spanish writer Layla Martínez and translators of her work, Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, come together for a virtual discussion of Martínez’s debut novel Woodworm, published by Two Lines Press.

The house breathes. The house contains bodies and secrets. The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes. It was built by a smalltime hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave. They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.

Martínez’s eerie debut novel, translated by Hughes and McDermott, is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. Described by Mariana Enriquez as “a house of shadows and women made of vengeance and poetry,” this vision of a broken family in our unjust world places power in the hands of the eccentric, the radical, and the desperate.

Join Martínez, Hughes, and McDermott for a virtual conversation about haunted houses, skeletons in the closet, and generational trauma.