From the celebrated writer Lina Meruane comes an electric novel of systems: those that keep the body alive, those that keep families together, those that govern the world around us and those that spin planets on their axes, out in the cosmic dark.

A young woman struggles to finish her PhD on stars and galaxies. Instead, she obsessively tracks the experience of her own body, listening to its functions and rhythms, finally locating in its patterns the beginning of illness and instability. As she discovers the precarity of her self, she begins to turn her attention to the distant orbits of her family members, each moving away from the familial system and each so different in their experiences, but somehow made similar in their shared history of illness and trauma, both political and personal...

“Nervous System is fast, uncompromising and shimmering with intelligence” SARAH MOSS, author of Summerwater

“Meruane is one of the one or two greats in the new generation of Chilean writers who promise to have it all” ROBERTO BOLAÑO