People in the Room

An uncanny exploration of desire, domestic space, isolation and voyeurism by a writer Borges loved - only now in English translation.

A young woman in Buenos Aires spies three women in the house across the street from her family’s home. Intrigued, she begins to watch them. She imagines them as accomplices to an unknown crime, as troubled spinsters contemplating suicide, or as players in an affair with dark and mysterious consequences. Lange’s imaginative excesses and almost hallucinatory images make this uncanny exploration of desire, domestic space, voyeurism and female isolation a twentieth century masterpiece. Too long viewed as Borges’s muse, Lange is today recognized in the Spanish-speaking world as a great writer and is here translated into English for the first time, to be read alongside Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras.

‘Deathly scenes from a wax museum come to life, in a closed, feminine world.’ - Cesar Aira

‘Lange breaks the canon that was suffocating women writers at the beginning of the twentieth century.’ - Delfina Muschietti

‘Only the dominant machismo of her era meant that Norah Lange was usually noted more for her Norwegian beauty than for her stature as a great writer. In People in the Room, Lange’s intensity and clarity are reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s finest moments in Mrs Dalloway.’ - El Cultural