False Calm
A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia
Published on 31. July 2025
264 pages
978-1-917092-24-1 (ISBN)
Description
Part reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm finds Argentinian author María Sonia Cristoff writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia as she journeys from one small town to the next.
Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. She explores Patagonia's complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit. In one town, a man struggles to maintain one of just two remaining stores because buses refuse to stop as scheduled; in another, the television in each household plays the same channel; elsewhere, she speaks with an amateur pilot who assembles model aeroplanes to keep himself company. Everywhere, Cristoff blends superstition, myth and firsthand accounts to conjure the reality of a Patagonia that unveils a startlingly lucid netherworld.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Daunt Books
File size
1,19 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-917092-24-1 (9781917092241)
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
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
07/2025
Daunt Originals
€14.00
Available immediately
Persons
María Sonia Cristoff was born in Trelew, Patagonia, Argentina, in 1965. She is the author of Include Me Out (2014, Ricardo Rojas Prize), and Mal de época (2017, shortlisted for the Médicis Prize), among others. Cristoff teaches in the Creative Writing Master's Program at the Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero and has been a writer-in-residence in Iowa and Leipzig. Her books have been published in several Latin American countries and translated into English, French, German, Italian, and Swedish. She walks compulsively, and currently lives in Buenos Aires.
