I Made You Up Inside My Head A Novel

A novel about the dangerous power of storytelling, set in motion by a chance encounter

On an overnight train from London to Edinburgh, a translator becomes engrossed in the stories of the strangers who share her compartment. One has adapted the harrowing childhood experience of an acquaintance for his controversial recent bestseller. The translator has a complicated history of her own. Over the course of a long night, the travelers share food, drink, and confidences that range across space and time, resurfacing old losses and betrayals and blurring the lines between fact and fiction.

A deft, unsettling, brilliantly orchestrated debut by a rising international star, I Made You Up Inside My Head asks how far we are allowed to borrow—and bend—the truth to our own ends.

Marta Pérez-Carbonell was born and raised in Spain and now teaches contemporary Spanish literature at Colgate University in upstate New York; she has also worked as a translator and interpreter. This is her first novel.

Rosalind Harvey is a literary translator whose previous work has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Oxford–Weidenfeld Translation Prize, among other honors. She lives in London.