This novel is not about extraterrestrial beings but about Mauricio Hernández Norambuena, who could be described, paraphrasing Bolaño, as one of the last revolutionaries of the Latin American “flowery wars”. Marciano takes Nona Fernández’s gamble to the extreme, as she has audaciously crossed memory and imagination to understand the recent history of Chile, immersing herself in areas that seem to go beyond earthly limits, where space and time are not so clear. The narrator visits Hernández in the prison where he is serving a long sentence to ask him questions, summoning several characters in a remarkable weave of voices to understand what his story was like: that of someone who, while cultivating inextinguishable loves and friendships, stirred up resistance to the dictatorship, was rifle in hand in the assassination attempt on Pinochet, and later, already in a democracy, ended up with lost illusions, deaths, prisons, and escapes. An electrifying novel that lands in the mind of a complex character to understand him in all his intensity and contradiction.
“Una obra luminosa y dolorosa. Marciano no solo reconstruye una vida: interroga la posibilidad misma de narrarla[…] y confirma a Nona Fernández como una de las voces más incisivas de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea.” – Cristina Rivera Garza
“Marciano is an exceptional book within an exceptional body of work: a powerful and moving reconstruction that exceeds any definition, advancing like a tightrope walker between reality and imagination. Memory— that dangerous, urgent, and necessary territory— becomes here a narrative whirlwind that unsettles, moves, and disarms. A literary artifact that interrogates the past in order to illuminate the present.” – Alia Trabucco Zerán
“In Marciano, we are immersed in a story of memories and longing. The complexity of this work, its daring nature, is reflected in the spiritual depth that allows us to see the protagonist as a multifaceted being, beyond his heroic aura.” Clarín
«Marciano […] no es una biografía, sino una novela que recoge el latido de una época, una crónica de luchas, ilusiones, represión y utopías que marcaron a todo un país. Y también una aguda reflexión sobre la ética de la violencia política que marcó el siglo XX». Andrés Seoane, La Lectura, El Mundo
58,000 words – 505 pages – Original Language: Spanish (Penguin Random House 2025) – Foreign Rights: World English (Graywolf Press, 2027), UK+Commonwealth/English (Daunt Books), Italian (Sur Edizioni, 2027), Brazilian Portuguese (Fósforo Editora, 2027), German (CulturBooks, 2027), Polish (Art Rage, 2027).