Aura

Carlos Fuentes · 1928–2012 · Mexico

Originally Aura (Spanish) · translated by Lysander Kemp

Why it matters

A historian answers an advertisement to organize a dead man's papers and finds himself drawn into his elderly employer's shuttered house, and into obsession with her elusive young niece, told entirely in the second person. Sixty uncanny pages; Mexico's most perfect ghost story.

At a glance

Sustained second-person narration throughout gives an eerie, disorienting register.