Los nuevos
Pedro Mairal
NOVEL | 2025 | 456 pages
Pedro Mairal’s highly anticipated return to the novel after his bestselling La uruguaya. A brilliant and moving portrait of the path from adolescence into adulthood.
Thiago, Pilar, and Bruno cross the unstable border between adolescence and adulthood during a summer that burns and a winter that isolates, with Buenos Aires as a backdrop like a labyrinth that they begin to decipher. How do they grow up when adults seem to be enemies? What can they do to confront the demands of becoming something they didn't choose? What shapes can love and desire take?
Marked by the loss of his mother, Thiago struggles to find his footing in a world from which he feels cast out. From a university in the United States, Bruno tries to find the vocabulary that best represents him while living in a foreign geography and language. Pilar, who has always been the group's center of gravity, is charged with sustaining what remains of this chosen family as her own family falls apart.
Pedro Mairal constructs a moving, authentic, and powerful novel about abandonment and about the abyss that is created when leaving childhood and its certainties behind. Los nuevos is a tender and fierce portrait of three friends who try to carve their own paths in a volatile environment where the only thing that remains firm is the bond that ties them together.
RIGHTS: spanish (world) PLANETA | portuguese (brazil) TODAVIA
“As is typical in Mairal’s books, Los nuevos includes a blend of everyday life and grandeur that works perfectly, with keen observations of reality and a skillful transposition of it into sublime terms that don’t come across as pretentious, but rather very fitting. The ordinary and the everyday are aptly combined with the ultimate meaning of time, vocation, friendship, or life itself, and this is true even when Mairal takes risks. (...) Los nuevos, therefore, has something of Nickolas Butler or even Jeffery Eugenides...but mostly, it confirms first of all that Pedro Mairal can tell any story he sets his mind to extraordinarily well, and second that his novels carry, without a doubt, a true guarantee of immense quality.”
“The orbit that Mairal inhabits by not discussing either childhood or the thing we call adulthood is quite conclusive. It feels like a wake-up call, as though he is pointing out the things that truly matter—love, friendship, the things that we barely have time to enjoy or notice before realizing we’ve run out of energy for new encounters. Mairal has written another one of those novels that remind us of the abyss, but also of the necessary steps to avoid falling into it.”
“Thiago, Pilar, and Bruno transition from adolescence to adulthood in a Buenos Aires that presents itself to them like a labyrinth they are just beginning to decipher. How do you grow up when adults feel like enemies? How do you confront the demand to be something you didn’t choose? Pedro Mairal’s return to the novel after La uruguaya is a story about helplessness and the abyss that opens up when you leave childhood behind.”
BY PEDRO MAIRAL:
Los nuevos
NOVEL, 2025
Esta historia ya no está disponible
ESSAYS, 2022
El gran surubí
NOVEL, 2012/2021
Breves amores eternos
SHORT STORIES, 2019
La uruguaya
NOVEL, 2016
Maniobras de evasión
ESSAYS, 2015
El subrayador
ESSAYS, 2014
El equilibrio
ESSAYS, 2013
Salvatierra
NOVEL, 2008
El año del desierto
NOVEL, 2005
Consumido final
POETRY, 2003
Hoy temprano
SHORT STORIES, 2001
Una noche con Sabrina Love
NOVEL, 1998
Tigre como los pájaros
POETRY, 1996