Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

"Vengeance and ghostly visitations undergird this début novel about a young woman and her grandmother who live in a house where they are plagued by what they call 'the woodworm' a 'bastard itch that won't leave you in peace or let you leave others in peace either.' The women's story is anchored in a long-simmering feud with their wealthier neighbors, which reaches back generations; when a child goes missing, the town's collective suspicions fall on the granddaughter, and the conflict boils over into the present. Shadowed by the Spanish Civil War and the remarkable cruelty of men, the violent tale unspools into a potent consideration of inherited trauma and the elusiveness of justice."

--The New Yorker

"Wonderfully bizarre and ceaselessly creepy...an exceptionally gloomy tale of anger and isolation, filled with strangeness, and delivered with sharp and fast prose. Through it all, Martínez explores larger topics of class resentment and the lingering effects of evil. Intergenerational trauma and monsters share the spotlight in this terrific debut."
--Gabino Iglesias, The New York Times

"Layla Martínez's debut novel is a claustrophobic slice of domestic horror, steeped in Catholicism and the supernatural, concerning a grandmother and granddaughter who share a haunted house in the barren Spanish interior....With impressive economy and hurtling intensity, Woodworm emits a howl of fury against entrenched inequality and enforced servitude, and the constraints they place on working-class women. In the gothic tradition the insatiable house becomes a metaphor: for societal structures and the inescapable stranglehold of history, echoing the grandmother's ominous mantra, 'nobody ever leaves.'"
--The Times Literary Supplement

"Chilling and beguiling, Woodworm is a work of ghostly wrath, about women who remember and men who forget, and how wealth lets the real monsters thrive in plain sight."
--Polygon

"A house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge. Layla Martínez' tense, chilling novel tells a story of specters, class war, violence, and loneliness, as naturally as if the witches had dictated this lucid, terrible nightmare to Martínez themselves."
--Mariana Enriquez, author of Our Share of Night

--Financial Times

"What gives Woodworm its spark is its balanced complexity. So much is packed in and all of it unfurls like a silk ribbon. It's a mystery. It's a political commentary. It's a genre-pleasing paranormal tale. Never is it too busy or distracted from its purpose. Every word is charged with menacing magic and readers will willingly fall victim to its curse."
--Fangoria

"If you're in the mood to read a story about a haunted house that will make your skin crawl, then I cannot recommend Woodworm by Layla Martínez enough. This book has everything, from witches to saints to angels that look like praying mantises to some of the most unsettling portrayals of ghosts that I've come across in a long time."

--Polygon

"Martinez's debut novel takes cabin fever to the max in this story of a grandmother, granddaughter, and their haunted house, set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. As the story unfolds, so do the house's secrets, the two women must learn to collaborate with the malevolent spirits living among them."
--The Millions

"Woodworm pays homage to genre icons like Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson, yet remains a deeply Spanish novel, deriving from considerations of social class and political history that are specific to twentieth-century Spain but universal enough to resonate with international audiences."
--Southwest Review

"Martinez debuts with a sophisticated ghost story about a former nanny suspected of involvement in a child's disappearance...breathes new life into the classic haunted house motif through her vivid exploration of generational trauma, violence, misogyny, and class. Readers won't soon forget this striking tale."
--Publishers Weekly

"Spanish author Martínez's fiction debut, succinctly co-translated by award-winning Hughes and McDermott, draws on her maternal grandmother's stories of surviving Franco's Spanish Civil War. Here, Martínez deftly alchemizes male entitlement, class privilege, and casual violence into damnable attributes."
--Booklist

"Martínez's prose is fairly straightforward with a menacing snarl....There are interesting dynamics simmering underneath, not least the palpable sense of inherited trauma and the oppressive nature of inequality....A ghost story buried in a family closet laden with skeletons and sins."
--Kirkus Reviews

"It pounces on us from the first line and doesn't let go until the last, if it lets go. The Gothic revival continues to expand and produce great works."
--Edmundo Paz Soldán, author of Norte

"Woodworm is a true literary event."
--Belén Gopegui, author of Stay This Day and Night with Me

"This book is the revenge of an intergenerational would, the embrace of barbarity, the loss of morels when trying to protect your loved ones. This book is the miserable and the wretched saying 'enough is enough.'"
--Alana S. Portero, author of Bad Habit