The Invention of Morel

The Invention of Morel is a novel by the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, published in Spanish in 1940 under the title La invencion de Morel by the Buenos Aires publisher Editorial Losada, with cover art for the first edition by Norah Borges. Although it was Bioy Casares's seventh book, he regarded it as the true beginning of his literary career, and it won the inaugural First Municipal Prize for Literature of Buenos Aires in 1941. The novel follows a fugitive hiding on a supposedly uninhabited island in Polynesia, whose fear of discovery when a group of tourists suddenly appears turns into obsessive, unrequited longing for one of them, a woman he cannot bring himself to approach, before he discovers a strange phenomenon on the island that makes ordinary contact with the visitors impossible and reshapes his understanding of what he is actually witnessing.