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Good and Evil and Other Stories
- Author
- Samanta Schweblin
- Narrator
- various
- Publisher
- Pan Macmillan
- Publish Date
- 4 September 2025
- Run Time
- 5 hours 29 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Brilliantly read by a multi-cast of narrators.
The International Bestseller
'Just stellar - extreme, uncanny and beautifully controlled' - Anne Enright, Booker Prize winning author of The Wren, The Wren
'These stories are perfect for the times we dwell inside' - Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon
The strange and explosive new collection from the incomparable imagination of Samanta Schweblin, a master of the short story.
A gripping blend of the raw, the astonishing and the tragic, every story is as perfectly unexpected as a snare: tightly, exquisitely wound, ready to snap at a touch.
Here, a young father is haunted by the consequences of a moment of distraction; tragedy is complicated by the inexplicable appearance of an injured horse; an attempted poisoning leads two writers to startling conclusions; a lonely woman’s charity is rewarded with home-invasion. And in the shocking opening story, a mother surfaces from the depths of the lake behind her house, where she saw something awful yet alluring.
Guilt, grief and relationships severed permeate this mesmerizing collection – but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love and longing, each sinister and beautiful. Step by step these unnerving stories lure us into the shadows to confront the monsters of everyday life – ourselves.
‘No one writes like Samanta Schweblin’ – Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home
Critics Review
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Just stellar - extreme, uncanny and beautifully controlled
Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren
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Remarkably taut, clear, precise, and yet capable of capturing the extent of our human messiness, these stories are perfect for the times we dwell inside
Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon
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Six fine narrators perform works that take the listener to Europe and Argentina, presenting characters in crisis. While all do exceptional work, Alma Cuervo’s cadence, eloquent style, and measured delivery of “A Fabulous Animal,” Victoria Villarreal’s portrayal of the youthful narrator of “The Woman from Atlántadita,” and Jamie K. Brown’s powerful delivery of the dramatic “Eye in the Throat” are especially powerful.
AudioFile
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I’ll be staying at home and reading lots over summer – several books by Samanta Schweblin; I recommend her Good and Evil and Other Stories. She is a fabulous writer. Her stories are subtle, always haunting and deeply human
Isabel Allende, author of The Wind Knows My Name
See more reviews See fewer reviews
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Time and again in her masterful new collection, Schweblin creates characters whose lifelines reach some of the most extraordinary questions ever articulated in our literature
Karen Russell, author of The Antidote
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Samanta Schweblin is one of the most exciting writers in the world
George Saunders
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No one writes like Samanta Schweblin. Her narratives are sui generis - wonderfully unpredictable and invitingly strange
Lorrie Moore, author of I am Homeless if This Is Not My Home
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Samanta Schweblin combines the urgent propulsion that characterizes all great storytelling with precise, if uncanny, descriptions of human feelings that often go unnamed, those ambiguous zones of human reality where awe, dread, and desire mingle
Siri Hustvedt, author of Memories of the Future
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These stories understand the secret moments and strange connections that resonate through a person's life - and they explore these intimacies with a razor sharp edge. Samanta Schweblin is at the top of her game
Heather Parry, author of Carrion Crow
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These beautifully crafted and eerily unsettling stories completely hypnotised me. This is the sort of storytelling which resonates in the head, the heart and all mysterious parts in between. I wish I could write like this
Jan Carson, author of The Raptures
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Samanta Schweblin has a rare ability to write stories that are more than just stories . . . She understands the delicate and monstrous music that is shaped from our shadows, from the ghosts we carry within us. That is why to read her is to remember; to read her is to witness, in bewilderment, a miracle made of disturbance and light
Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender is the Flesh
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These stories grip with a real and disturbing power. Dark currents pulse through Samanta Schweblin’s cool and poised prose in this immaculate translation by Megan McDowell.
Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days
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Nobody understands the balance of light and darkness of the human mind as well as Samanta Schweblin. She is a master of the edge, of the contour, the suggestion. The most brilliant writer of short stories writing today, she now delivers her most haunting, fierce and provocative book
Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive
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The atmosphere in these stories, crafted with striking clarity, foreshadows that at some point, everything will go awry, and the effects of that twist will haunt the protagonists forever. These are not ghost stories. They are something far worse and far better: they are stories about human beings
Leila Guerriero, author of La Llamada
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A book of finely wrought tales exploring family, grief, love, and longing
The i Paper
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Bravura . . . standout . . . eerie and remarkably moving . . . [you will find yourself] in the space on the other side of terror – a space of openness, fragility and strange reassurance
The Guardian
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In prose that shimmers with a sort of menacing lyricism . . . powerfully evocative and unsettling. They seem to hover, indeed like fever dreams, between the reassuring familiarities of domestic life and the stark, unpredictable, visionary flights of the unconscious. Everything exists in a state of tension, charged with contradictions
Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review
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Schweblin, a master of the uncanny, keeps us in this kind of ever-shifting gray area between the two poles of her title
The New Yorker
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Exquisitely unnerving
Financial Times
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I loved Good and Evil and Other Stories
Irish Times
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Samanta Schweblin
- Narrator
- various
- Duration
- 5 hours 29 minutes
- Release Date
- 4 September 2025
- ISBN
- 9781035050208
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Pan Macmillan
- Genre
- Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, Contemporary horror, ghost stories and supernatural fiction, Short stories, Magical realism
Synopsis
Brilliantly read by a multi-cast of narrators. The International Bestseller'Just stellar - extreme, uncanny and beautifully controlled' - Anne Enright, Booker Prize winning author of The Wren, The Wren'These stories are perfect for the times we dwell inside' - Colum McCann, author of ApeirogonThe strange and explosive new collection from the incomparable imagination of Samanta Schweblin, a master of the short story. A gripping blend of the raw, the astonishing and the tragic, every story is as perfectly unexpected as a snare: tightly, exquisitely wound, ready to snap at a touch.Here, a young father is haunted by the consequences of a moment of distraction; tragedy is complicated by the inexplicable appearance of an injured horse; an attempted poisoning leads two writers to startling conclusions; a lonely woman’s charity is rewarded with home-invasion. And in the shocking opening story, a mother surfaces from the depths of the lake behind her house, where she saw something awful yet alluring.Guilt, grief and relationships severed permeate this mesmerizing collection – but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love and longing, each sinister and beautiful. Step by step these unnerving stories lure us into the shadows to confront the monsters of everyday life – ourselves.‘No one writes like Samanta Schweblin’ – Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home
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