The Unworthy: A Novel

by Agustina Bazterrica, Sarah Moses (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

In under 200 pages, Agustina Bazterrica gives us a harrowing look at a dystopian future through an unforgettable heroine. Cults, climate crises and extremism collide in this razor sharp story.

THE JAW-DROPPING NATIONAL BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION

The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668051887
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	03/04/2025
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Agustina Bazterrica was born in Buenos Aires in 1974. She has a degree in art from the University of Buenos Aires, works as a cultural administrator, and has served on the jury for literary competitions such as the Premio Fondo Nacional de las Artes. She writes essays and fiction and has published one short story collection and three novels, including Tender Is the Flesh, which won the Clarín Novel Prize, was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards, and was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and Vogue. Tender Is the Flesh also became a worldwide bestseller, with more than 600,000 copies sold in the United States alone. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has sold over one million copies worldwide.

Sarah Moses is a Canadian writer and translator of French and Spanish. She has translated work by Latin American authors, including Tomás Downey and Ariana Harwicz, whose novel Die, My Love was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the Best Translated Book Award. The Unworthy is the third of Agustina Bazterrica’s books she has translated into English. She is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Strange Water.

Editorial Reviews

One of New York Magazine's Best Books of 2025
One of Oprah Daily and LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025
One of Goodreads’s Most Anticipated Horror Books of 2025
One of Heatmap’s 18 Climate Books to Read in 2025
 

“[In] Agustina Bazterrica’s brilliant, chilling new novel … the horror is made visceral by her feverish, mythic prose…filled with secrets.”
—The New York Times

“Novels about female societies tend toward utopian coexistence or ruthless backbiting. The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica does something more interesting...cinematically gruesome.”
—The Atlantic

“Caustically original… an end-of-the-world scenario with a Handmaid’s Tale vibe… A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.”
—Kirkus

“Bazterrica's absorbing feminist literary horror novel (previously available only in Spanish) stars an unnamed narrator who documents her deplorable situation in an illicit diary as a survivor living in a converted monastery… This satirical horror is incisive and convincing as it skewers religious fervor and blind obedience.”
—Booklist (starred)

“A sympathetic and fiery translation...The Unworthy turns an astute if despairing eye to a not-so-distant global future where small numbers of depraved elites force the desperate masses to make unimaginable compromises to secure fundamental needs such as food, shelter, and companionship...”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“The Unworthy is an eerie parable about the climate crisis and ideological extremism.”
—Chicago Review of Books

“Agustina Bazterrica’s climate crisis horror tale explores ideological extremes in times of catastrophe, and how seductive it is to turn self-destructive.”
—LitHub

“This heartrending postapocalyptic tale from Bazterrica (Tender Is the Flesh) examines religious devotion and the search for tenderness in a world torn apart by climate collapse. Moses’s translation is marvelous, capturing the lush lyricism with which Bazterrica describes the most harrowing extremes of human experience. Calling to mind Cormac McCarthy and Chelsea G. Summers, this is as beautiful as it is brutal.”
—Publishers Weekly

"The Unworthy is unflinching, uncompromising, and unforgettable. Agustina Bazterrica shines a light at the end of the brutal and bleak path we are on so that maybe, just maybe, we can turn around and forge a new one."
—Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts 

"Barbaric, brutal, and utterly beautiful. The Unworthy is a searing haunt of a novel that I will never forget."
—Lucy Rose, author of The Lamb

"Brutal and aching. A perfect fever dream of a book."
—Heather Darwent, author of The Things We Do To Our Friends

From the Publisher