The Trial of Anna Thalberg

$22.00

BY EDUARDO SANGARCÍA

Translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer

Winner of the 2020 Mauricio Achar Award

Does evil lurk in the shadows of the forest, or in the human heart? Eduardo Sangarcía’s tale of one woman’s witch trial opens the door to deeper horrors.

Hardcover • ISBN: 9781632063731
Publication date: Sept 10, 2024

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About the Book

Anna Thalberg is a peasant woman shunned for her red hair and provocative beauty. When she is dragged from her home and accused of witchcraft, her neighbors do not intervene. Only Klaus, Anna’s husband, and Father Friedrich, a priest experiencing a crisis of faith, set out to the city of Würzburg to prove her innocence. There, Anna faces isolation and torture inside the prison tower, while the populace grows anxious over strange happenings within the city walls. Can Klaus and Friedrich convince the church to release Anna, or will she burn at the stake?

Set in the Holy Roman Empire during the Protestant Reformation, The Trial of Anna Thalberg is a story of religious persecution, superstition, and human suffering. While exploring the medieval fear of witches and demons, it delves into enduring human concerns: the historical oppression of women, the inhumanity of institutions, and the question of God’s existence. Frantic in pace and experimental in form, this novel is an unforgettable debut from Mexican author Eduardo Sangarcía.

Praise for THE Trial of Anna thalberg

“A marvelous work that challenges the reader on multiple levels and communicates directly with our present.”

— Cristina Rivera Garza, author of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice

“Misogyny and religious conviction are vicious bedfellows in Eduardo Sangarcía’s horrifying, humbling . . . inferno of a historical novel, burning through the lies told about defiant women across the centuries.”

— Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

“Mexican writer Sangarcía lays bare the horrors [of Anna Thalberg's fate] in exacting, terrifying detail. Australian writer Bryer is a worthy translator for Sangarcía’s intriguing, rarely punctuated prose; his side-by-side two-columned non-confessions between Anna and Hahn are particularly, frightfully inventive and disturbingly accurate for the disconnect between what’s said, heard, and willfully (mis)understood.”

— Terry Hong, Booklist, Starred Review

“In Elizabeth Bryer’s translation of Sangarcía’s original Spanish, Anna’s ordeal is narrated like a fever dream, pitting the hideous realities of her incarceration against the paranoid fantasies of her accusers. Tortured to ‘extract a truth that was not true,’ she offers an innocently implacable resistance that infuriates the cleric who’s been tasked with gaining her confession.”

— Alida Becker, The New York Times

“Challenging the reader to reflect on who wields power and the ways women are still subjected to violence, Sangarcía illuminates the connection between Anna’s plight and that of women fighting for autonomy today. A compelling debut, tracing a direct line from women in the past to those in the present.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“[Sangarcía's] prose moves through time with the same fluidity as that between its shifts of perspective, providing an apt flooding of what is, what has been, and what will be . . . This intermingling makes palpable the sense that Anna’s story has only one possible end; the events, once set in motion, have only to pass, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop them.”

— Henry Gifford, Asymptote

“A novel to be read with great emotion and suspense, written with impressive formal virtuosity.”

— Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season

“Sangarcía pulls together an astute account of Anna’s trial and sheds light on how witch hunts were rooted in the hatred and suspicion of women (‘little girls like you only bring misfortunes and calamities’). The prose, lyrical and scarcely punctuated, matches the plot’s frenzied pace. Fans of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season will love this.”

— Publisher’s Weekly

“As bleak as it is beautiful. Sangarcía has given us a story that is breathlessly told, formally innovative, and lays bare our all-too-common tendency towards cruelty, while never foregoing his own humanity. Welcome to a new, luminous voice in literature.”

— Elizabeth Gonzalez James, author of The Bullet Swallower

“Eduardo Sangarcía’s writing blends a sophisticated feeling for history with penetrating intuition about human consciousness to conjure elegant nightmares. One of the most attractive voices of contemporary Mexican literature.”

— Julián Herbert, author of Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino

“A merciless chronicle of witchcraft trials that is more than a mere testimony of the times: it is also a trial of the violence that has historically been exercised against women. With a coven of torrential voices, Eduardo Sangarcía lays bare the unreasonableness of a past that also speaks of our present.”

— Juan Gómez Bárcena, author of Not Even the Dead

“With an audacious style, the singular use of juxtaposed dialogue, and a structure reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Eduardo Sangarcía achieves a narrative feat that keeps us hooked until the very last line. Although we know what will happen, since he has advertised it from the beginning, we believe in the unexpected, hoping for the miracle to occur. In the end he both pleases and surprises us, just the way great literature ought to do.”

— Yoss, author of A Planet for Rent

“With breathless rhythm and a raging as well as plaintive tone . . . [the novel] builds a magnificent celebration of the feminine.”

— Le monde

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eduardo Sangarcía (Guadalajara, México, 1985), holds a master’s degree in Mexican Literature Studies from the University of Guadalajara. He is the author of El desconocido del Meno (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, 2017), which won the Premio Nacional de Cuento Joven Comala 2017, and Anna Thalberg (Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2021), winner of the Premio Mauricio Achar 2020.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Elizabeth Bryer is a translator and writer from Australia. Her translations include prizewinning works by María José Ferrada, Claudia Salazar Jiménez, José Luis de Juan, and Aleksandra Lun. Her debut novel, From Here On, Monsters, was co-winner of the 2020 Norma K. Hemming award.