Hamish Hamilton snaps up Eduardo Halfon's 'transfixing' Tarantula
Hamish Hamilton has acquired Eduardo Halfon’s "powerfully ambivalent" new novel Tarantula, translated by Daniel Hahn.
Editorial director Hermione Thompson bought UK and Commonwealth rights from María Juncosa at Casanovas & Lynch and will publish the novel in paperback in spring 2026.
North American rights were previously sold to Halfon’s long-standing US publisher, Bellevue Publishing. Translations are also available or forthcoming in Brazil, Denmark, France, Israel, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the Netherlands.
"Set in the early 1980s, Tarantula tells the story of 13-year-old Eduardo, who is sent to the Guatemalan mountains during a school holiday for what his parents describe as a Jewish children’s camp," the synopsis says. "What this turns into, however, on the morning of the fourth day, is an immersive re-enactment of a Nazi concentration camp."
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It adds: "Thought-provoking and powerfully ambivalent, Tarantula is an extraordinary meditation on the many complex afterlives of the Holocaust. It is a novel about individual and collective inheritance, individual and collective violence; about memory, trauma, connection and estrangement."
Halfon said: "Tarantula is based on a distant memory from my childhood, one I’d half-forgotten until I recounted the story to a group of colleagues one day – and right there and then, as I watched their reactions around the table, I started to feel the urge to turn it into fiction."
Thompson said: "Halfon’s work is utterly transfixing: surreal, frightening, obliquely revelatory, charged with a sense of intimacy and risk. He is a writer deeply interested in the locked doors of this world and what lies behind them. He is also a great writer of pleasure and porousness, of what happens when you let the world in. Above all, his fiction examines how identity reverberates and reconfigures down the generations: how the victim of one story becomes the perpetrator in the next and how the same man may wear many faces."
