Rooted in the unsettling familiarity of a suburban shopping mall and the halo of childhood nostalgia, DON’T LEAVE HER ALONE is both an eerie and witty portrait of what happens when fear is left unchecked – festering within us until it consumes us from the inside out.
Alba has spent her life unable to be alone, clinging to the presence of others to silence the anxieties she refuses to face. But when she wakes up on the floor of a shopping mall, covered in blood and with only fragmented memories of how she got there, she is forced to confront the truth she has long avoided. Meanwhile, her sister Diana struggles to balance the pressures of motherhood and work, while their mother, Carmen, remains trapped in an endless cycle of sacrifice and duty, caring for her daughters and grandchildren.
As Christmas Eve approaches, the tension between them becomes unbearable and what once seemed like ordinary family struggles transforms into a surreal nightmare. As the tensions the three women have long held in explode, they’re finally forced to confront the terror that connects them.
Haunting, cinematic, and strikingly visceral, Desiree’s novel is an incisive exploration of motherhood that interrogates women’s struggle for autonomy and identity and ultimately forces the question: what does it take to finally break free?
‘Being mothers and being daughters can feel like body horror and that is what Desiree de Fez’s brilliant debut novel does: it turns bonds of intense love into torn bodies, glitter, and anxiety. Don’t Leave Her Alone is full of tenderness and delirium, moving between suburban realism and fairy tale.’ – Mariana Enriquez, author and journalist
‘Don’t Leave Her Alone captures that special kind of neuroticism intrinsic to each family. The obligation of mothers to their daughters, of sisters to each other, erupts with enough blood and viscera to make Clive Barker proud. Desirée de Fez delivers a Christmas miracle in the darkest way possible.’ – Gus Moreno, author of THIS THING BETWEEN US
‘Don’t Leave Her Alone is an eldritch Pedro Almodovar nightmare, charting those liminal terrors found beyond the boundaries of the human body, where flesh itself is not safe’ – Clay McLeod Chapman, author of DEVIL INSIDE and GHOST EATERS
‘Compelling to the point of hypnotic, a tender and visceral study of mothers, daughters and sisters that recalls the best of King, Enriquez and Almodóvar, but which is ultimately uniquely its own. A gem’ – Virginia Feito, author of VICTORIAN PSYCHO
Desirée de Fez (Author)
Desirée de Fez is one of Europe’s foremost experts in fantasy and horror literature and film. Over the past fifteen years, she has worked with some of the world’s most significant independent film production companies and has advised Spanish, Latin American, and American producers and directors. Desirée is also a film critic, specialising in fantasy and horror cinema, and works as a programmer for an international film festival. Don’t Leave Her Alone is her debut novel.
Lizzie Davis (Translator)
Lizzie Davis is a writer, an editor and a translator from Spanish and Italian. Her recent translations include Juan Cárdenas’s The Devil of the Provinces (longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature) and Ornamental (finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize), as well as work by Valeria Luiselli, Daniela Tarazona, Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, and Elena Medel. She is the executive editor at Transit Books, following nearly a decade at Coffee House Press.
