The Artifact, the excellent first novel in English by acclaimed Spanish author Germán Sierra, occupies a fascinating space between the scientific and the psychedelic, where the boundaries that divide humanity and technology blur and we’re asked to consider what we are in relation to the accumulated data that trails and increasingly defines us.

Sierra has published five previous novels and a collection of stories in Spanish, and has been widely anthologized. Though some of his short fiction has been translated into English, this is the first time that one of his novels has been made available to the English-language audience. This is particularly exciting because Sierra has written The Artifact directly in English, granting a new readership access to his unique narrative mind without the filtering lens of translation.