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Juan Pablo Villalobos

Down the Rabbit Hole

Shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award and the 2012 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize

Tochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron on the verge of taking over a powerful cartel, and Tochtli is growing up in a luxury hideout that he shares with hit men, prostitutes, dealers, servants and the odd corrupt politician or two.

Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child’s wish.

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With an introduction by Adam Thirlwell.
Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award and the 2012 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Read And Other Stories publisher Stefan Tobler’s thoughts on Juan Pablo Villalobos’ Guardian First Book Award shortlisting and the unprecedented success of And Other Stories’ first year of publishing here.
Readers of Spanish may be interested to read more reviews and other thoughts posted on Villalobos’ website.
Down the Rabbit Hole has created quite a buzz in the Spanish-speaking world and beyond. It was published in Spain in 2010 (Anagrama) and has been translated into many languages, including Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Romanian, Dutch and English.
Farrar Straus and Giroux publishes Rosalind Harvey’s translation in the United States.
If you subscribed to And Other Stories before this book went to print, you would have received one of the limited number stamped, early copies of it and 3 other And Other Stories titles. Find out about subscribing to upcoming titles.

Print status: Available

Author: Juan Pablo Villalobos

Translator: Rosalind Harvey

Original language: Spanish

Format: B-format paperback

Publication date: 4 July 2013

ISBN: 9781908276285

Ebook ISBN: 9781908276049

Availability: UK, Europe and Commonwealth

Number of pages: 96

Reviews

Ali Smith
The Telegraph

‘A pint-size novel about innocence, beastliness and a child learning the lingo in a drug wonderland. Funny, convincing, appalling, it’s a punch-packer for one so small.’

Adam Thirlwell

‘Down the Rabbit Hole is a miniature high-speed experiment with perspective … a deliberate, wild attack on the conventions of literature.’

Sarah Churchwell
New Statesman

‘That rarest of animals, a book that is, to all intents and purposes, perfect.’

Boyd Tonkin
The Independent

'Juan Pablo Villalobos, channeled Mexico’s drug wars via the voice of a narco-baron’s son in his touching and invigorating Down the Rabbit Hole.’

Nicholas Lezard
The Guardian

‘If you’re going to have an imprisoned child narrate a novel, then not so much as a word should be out of place. There are no such slips in Juan Pablo Villalobos’s debut novella. We have here a control over the material which is so tight it is almost claustrophobic. […] This is a novel about failing to understand the bigger picture, and in its absence we can see it more clearly.’

Edward King
Sunday Times

‘The cumulative parodic effect is chillingly powerful.’

Jane Shilling
The Daily Mail

'Villalobos creates Tochtli’s half-corrupt, half-innocent world […] with a brilliant, tragi-comic light touch.’

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