Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Friends

Friends

Venturini, Aurora
Maude, Kit

Paperback

General Fiction

Publisher Price: $17.95

PREORDER - Expected ship date December 8, 2026

ISBN10: 1593768230
ISBN13: 9781593768232
Publisher: Soft Skull
Published: Dec 8 2026
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.81
Language: English
From prize-winning author Aurora Venturini, a masterful and acerbic novel about a successful artist in her 80s returning to her hometown in Argentina after decades living and working in Europe, reckoning with old and new friends, lovers, and ideas

In a breathless, incantatory voice, Friends tells the story of Yuna Riglos, a celebrated Argentine painter nearing the end of her life. From her apartment in La Plata, Yuna writes as she paints: obsessively, associatively, driven by memory rather than chronology. Fame has not delivered peace. Instead, it has sharpened her awareness of what art cannot redeem.

At the center of the book is Antonella, a teenage girl from the slums who enters Yuna's life as a housekeeper and becomes something far more unsettling: muse, double, survivor, and moral reckoning. As Yuna shelters Antonella from an unspeakable past of hunger, violence, and incest, the novel probes the uneasy ethics of care, authorship, and representation. What does it mean to protect another person--and what does it mean to turn their suffering into art?

Threaded through the narrative are spectral presences from Argentine and European culture--Pizarnik, Lautréamont, Dante, Goya--figures of genius and despair who haunt Yuna's imagination as both warning and justification. Friendship, especially between women, emerges as both refuge and trap, most painfully embodied in the fate of Yuna's fellow artist Matilde du Pin.

By turns savage, tender, comic, and horrifying, this is a novel about beauty and monstrosity, class and cruelty, the body as archive, and the terrible persistence of memory. Friends asks whether art can offer salvation--or whether it merely gives shape to what cannot be forgiven or undone.

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