Little Eyes

by Samanta Schweblin

Contemporary

Literary

Suspense

224 Pages

"Little Eyes made me question every camera in my home. Schweblin has created something deeply unsettling and utterly brilliant."

Synopsis

In Little Eyes, kentukis have become a global phenomenon—adorable mechanical stuffed animals with cameras for eyes and wheels for feet, connected to an anonymous worldwide network. Buy a kentuki and a stranger watches through its eyes from anywhere on earth. Or become a kentuki yourself and inhabit someone else's life from behind a screen. Across the globe, these connections reveal themselves in unexpected ways: a Croatian hustler finds himself entangled in a Brazilian crime ring, a lonely Peruvian woman becomes obsessed with a young German couple, and a motherless child in Antigua discovers a surrogate family in snowy Norway. Through interconnected stories spanning continents, Schweblin explores what happens when technology dissolves the boundaries between intimacy and intrusion. These digital creatures promise connection and wonder, but they also open doors to surveillance, obsession, and unimaginable danger. As the line between observer and participant blurs, the question becomes: who is really in control?

Our Take

Samanta Schweblin has crafted a haunting meditation on our technology-saturated world that feels both wildly inventive and uncomfortably prescient. Little Eyes unfolds through a series of interwoven vignettes spanning the globe, each one exploring a different facet of connection—and disconnection—in the digital age. Schweblin, celebrated for her masterful short story collection Mancation Rest Stop and her Man Booker-shortlisted novel Fever Dream, brings her signature unsettling atmosphere to this exploration of voyeurism and intimacy. The kentukis themselves are brilliantly conceived: simultaneously adorable and sinister, liberating and invasive. What makes this novel so compelling is how Schweblin resists easy moralizing. Some kentuki connections lead to genuine beauty and unexpected love; others descend into obsession, exploitation, and horror. The structure mirrors our fragmented online existence—we jump from life to life, never quite settling, always watching. For readers who loved the technological paranoia of The Circle by Dave Eggers or the interconnected storytelling of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Little Eyes offers a fresh and deeply unsettling take on surveillance culture and the strange intimacies of our hyper-connected age.