Things follows four recent graduates – Munir, G, Ernesto and Álex – who travel from Madrid to the south of France to work the grape harvest. Except things don't go as planned: they end up working on an industrial chicken farm and living on a campsite, where a general sense of menace takes hold. What follows is a compelling and incisive examination of precarious employment, capitalism, immigration and the mass production of
living
things, all interwoven with the protagonist's thoughts on literature and the nature of storytelling. A genre-bending and dystopian eco-thriller,
Living
Things is a punk-like blend of Roberto Bolaño's
The Savage Detectives and Samanta Schweblin's
Fever Dream, heralding an exciting new voice in international fiction.
