Mona

Mona, a Peruvian writer based in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior: she likes drugs and cigarettes, has mysterious bruises on her neck, and pokes fun at American academic culture and its identity fixation, of which she herself is a beneficiary: "In her role of overeducated Latina in the era of Trump, Mona experienced her serene captivity as a kind of freedom..."

Nominated for "the most important literary prize in Europe," Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, and so she trades the temptations of California for a small gray village in Sweden. Now she is stuck in the company of her jetlagged—and mostly male—competitors, arriving from Japan, Armenia, Iran, Iceland, Finland, and elsewhere. Isolated as they are, the writers do what writers do: compliment one other, envy one other, stab one other in the back, and go to bed with one another.

Mona finds that she has not so much escaped her demons as locked herself up in the middle of nowhere with them, and her adventures in Scandinavia paint a hypnotic, scabrous, and jaw-dropping portrait of a woman facing down a hipster elite to which she both does and does not belong. Bearing scars that are by no means merely literary, Mona endures plagiarism, patronization, and endless lectures, until her past catches up with her, and she triumphs at last, in a truly apocalyptic fashion.