“Trias has created a world where all social norms and conventions disintegrate, where a helpful neighbour turns into a spy and the rooftop of an urban building serves as the only escape from a crumbling world. A chilling tour-de-force by one of the most exciting and subversive voices writing today in Latin America.”

“Are threats and pain external or do they come from inside our own bodies? What is the root of violence? What are we afraid of? Is it possible to find a roof to where we are finally able to breathe? What are our umbilical cords?. Fernanda Trías does not answer these questions about instinct, civilization and taboos—it is impossible. Instead, she outlines them and dives deep into them a with a grotesque and forceful story written with agility and a Kafkaesque sense of humor. Dare to read it.”

“La azotea is one of those wild books that lands in our hands in order to move and hold us. (…) Trías traps us with a style that is careful but direct, at times very close to poetic prose, where reality mixes with Clara’s interior world (…) La azotea is an incredibly beautiful and suggestive book despite its darkness, one that has overwhelming intimacy and emotion that infects readers and brings them back home to evaluate their own fears and anxieties.”

“Fernanda Trías has crafted a unique world that we feel inevitably drawn to.”

“Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías (1976) is one of the most unsettling and suggestive Latin American writers today. (…) Insatiable, Trías denies readers any form of escape, making them face an overwhelming ending. The only consolation is the knowledge of having endured some distressing and remarkable hours of great literature, along with the discovery of an excellent storyteller.”

“Trías’s narration is constructed with a first-person point of view that balances between sanity and delirium, affected by fear and a dark past that is suggested but never named and concentrated from behind closed doors as a reaction to a world steeped in danger. The result is a claustrophobic atmosphere that Clara inhabits with her elderly dad, her newborn daughter, and a few secondary characters.”

“What Fernanda Trías proposes—aside from the suffocating story of a woman corroded by envy, unhinged to exhaustion, and invaded by elusive fears—is an inverse journey. Her prose appears to move forward, but it constantly retracts, increasingly reducing the space, slowly extinguishing the air until she creates a minuscule world, imperceptible, where no human being could ever exist.”

“A hypnotic and powerful novel about how things can become twisted, a novel full of silences and secrets about what can happen when you have, one could say, a bad relationship with reality.”

“A work that has the narrative force of a novel and the length of a novella. However, the genre doesn’t matter much when the work has the quality of La azotea: a claustrophobic story not only due to the setting where the action takes place, but because of the narration itself.”

“Family, intimacy, and madness intertwine in this exceptional story by Fernanda Trías...If anything is clear in La azotea, it’s that we are faced with an author who has worked on her voice, and that with it she has conceived of an interior world that is absolutely idiosyncratic, without the need for gimmicks, major issues, or exasperating customs.”

“Trías crafts a suggestive and subtle universe. (...) A short and powerful read, it demands to be re-read and scrutinised.”