The Invisible Years
Published on 9. April 2026
Book
Hardback
250 pages
978-1-64605-415-2 (ISBN)
Description
"It's impossible to get a single answer from the past. It's not a key to anything. It's just a place we go to trick ourselves."
Andrea and Julian haven't seen one another in twenty-one years-not since the tragic, fateful night their senior year of high school that marked their group of friends forever. A startling phone call brings the two together again in Houston, where they begin to unravel the truth of that year, picking open long scabbed-over wounds from their upper-class adolescence in 1990s Bolivia?and the scandal that ripped them apart.
A writer unhappy in his career and his marriage, Julian has been novelizing the past for his next book, trying to make meaning out of the events that changed the course of their lives forever. "I'd thought that writing about that time would free me, relieve the burden of the invisible years," he writes, "but often it seems that it's done the reverse." Juxtaposing the naive invincibility of adolescence with the grasping uncertainties of adulthood, The Invisible Years deftly weaves a coming-of-age tale that leaves the reader hanging on every word, even as they know how the cards fall in the end.
Andrea and Julian haven't seen one another in twenty-one years-not since the tragic, fateful night their senior year of high school that marked their group of friends forever. A startling phone call brings the two together again in Houston, where they begin to unravel the truth of that year, picking open long scabbed-over wounds from their upper-class adolescence in 1990s Bolivia?and the scandal that ripped them apart.
A writer unhappy in his career and his marriage, Julian has been novelizing the past for his next book, trying to make meaning out of the events that changed the course of their lives forever. "I'd thought that writing about that time would free me, relieve the burden of the invisible years," he writes, "but often it seems that it's done the reverse." Juxtaposing the naive invincibility of adolescence with the grasping uncertainties of adulthood, The Invisible Years deftly weaves a coming-of-age tale that leaves the reader hanging on every word, even as they know how the cards fall in the end.
Reviews / Votes
"The incisive latest from Rodrigo Hasbun (Affections) finds a Bolivian American writer reconnecting with the estranged friend whose abortion as a teen inspired his novel in progress. In chapters alternating from their high-school years in the 1990s to the present day in Houston, Hasbun crafts striking set pieces . . . This one hits hard." -Publishers Weekly"A formally ambitious novel tracing parallel narratives Bolivia and the U.S., alternating present and possibly fictionalized past . . . As the narrator and his old friend catch up, Hasbun generates tension from the way they refer to events we have yet to read about in the 1990s sections-including hints that something very bad is about to befall those characters. A heady exploration of memory and friendship-and the places where both can fray." -Kirkus Reviews
"If you didn't know Bolivian literature is one of the finest of our day, you will after reading The Invisible?Years. Hasbun has written a fun and tender book about the passing of time and the stories scars are made of, beautifully translated by the great Lily Meyer." -Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
"Rodrigo Hasbun is a writer who knows how to lead the reader to walk along the ridge between what is true and what is not. Is it possible that the two forty-year-olds who meet in a bar in Houston are the same people who, more than twenty years earlier as teenagers in Bolivia, lived through those shocking, violent days of a March that changed their lives forever? Which life is the most real? The one transposed into memory, the one lived in the present, or the one that becomes a story? The Invisible Years, so tense and aching, places these doubts at the center of the novel." -Andrea Bajani, author of The Book of Homes
"I met Rodrigo Hasbun many years ago at a literary festival in The Hague and he immediately caught my attention. He seemed to me an empathetic, imaginative and intelligent young man, like many writers from Latin America. I read his novels with passion. His prose is lucid, well-constructed, mature, with an obvious ethical and political foundation, but also the paranoid science of connecting the dots. A few years later I met him again by chance on the streets of Brussels, but there is no such thing as a coincidence." -Mircea Cartarescu, author of Solenoid
"The Invisible Years is a poignant novel with a graceful translation by Lily Meyer, who manages the shifts in tone and syntax between time periods with ease." -On the Seawall
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Texas
United States
Product notice
With dust jacket
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 138 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
284 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-64605-415-2 (9781646054152)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Rodrigo Hasbun is a Bolivian writer and screenwriter. He is the author of eight works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Affections (Simon & Schuster), which received an English PEN Award and has been translated into twelve languages. Named one of Granta's Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists in 2010, Hasbun's short stories have appeared in Granta, McSweeney's, Zoetrope: All-Story, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Houston.
Lily Meyer is a translator, a critic, and the author of the novels The End of Romance and Short War. She is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso's Little Bird and Ice for Martians, Abraham Jimenez Enoa's The Hidden Island, and Clara Uson's The Shy Assassin.
Lily Meyer is a translator, a critic, and the author of the novels The End of Romance and Short War. She is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso's Little Bird and Ice for Martians, Abraham Jimenez Enoa's The Hidden Island, and Clara Uson's The Shy Assassin.