# Tarantula

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/eduardo-halfon/tarantula/9781405986779

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![Tarantula](https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin/eduardo-halfon/tarantula_978-14-0598-677-9-db1d8eae.webp?v=2026-10-15%2002%3A38%3A49)

- Book: [Tarantula](https://www.bookquiver.com/eduardo-halfon/tarantula) ([Tarantula.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/eduardo-halfon/tarantula.md))
- Authors: [Eduardo Halfon](https://www.bookquiver.com/eduardo-halfon)
- Publisher: Penguin
- Translated by: Daniel Hahn
- Medium: ebook
- ISBN: 978-14-0598-677-9
- Published: 2026-03-05
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: E-book

## Description

'We woke up to screaming. In the doorway stood the silhouette of Samuel Blum, our friend and unconditional protector, now uniformed in black and carrying a club. Crawling down his left arm, I slowly noticed, was a huge tarantula.' In 1984, twelve-year-old Eduardo is sent to the mountains for what his parents describe as Jewish summer camp. What it turns out to be is an immersive re-enactment of a Nazi concentration camp. Decades later, on the other side of the world, Eduardo sits across a table from a stranger. This is Samuel Blum, the Jewish camp counsellor who transformed into a terrifying Nazi commandant all those years ago. Now he is an old man, and he is ready to talk. Tarantula is a novel about individual and collective inheritance, individual and collective violence; about memory, trauma, connection and estrangement. It asks what it means to be a Jew living in the long aftermath of the twentieth century, and how the past lives on the present.