The Summer of the Serpent

This surreal, horror-tinged, Guadalajara-set work of Latin American "literature of the unusual" is a kaleidoscopic descent into the small violences and hidden horrors of one sweltering summer, forming a coil of vignettes that slither under the skin for a strange, deeply human portrait of memory, myth, and family. For fans of Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and Brenda Lozano. Guadalajara, Mexico, 1977. In a quiet residential neighborhood, children witness things they can never forget: a serpent girl weeping in a carnival glass box, a neighbor who dangles his dog from a tree, and a ghost who returns night after night, desperate to tell its story. Meanwhile, the grown-ups drift through the season half oblivious, their spirits eroding as the relentless summer wears on. Told in colliding voices-children and adults, ghosts and the haunted, the living and the almost-invisible-The Summer of the Serpent is a prismatic portrait of the past, where memory is shot through with myth. Each narrator offers a fragment of the truth, until the stories twist together into a shape as elusive and mesmerizing as the boa constrictor that winds its way through the neighborhood. Strange yet deeply human, this brilliantly fragmented novel captures the moment when childhood innocence begins to corrode-and how those memories can coil through a lifetime.

Cecilia Eudave lives in Guadalajara, Mexico, and teaches at the Universidad de Guadalajara. She is the author of the story collections Técnicamente humanos, En primera persona, and Registro de imposibles, as well as the novel Bestiaria vida, which won the Juan García Ponce Literary Award. Robin Myers is a poet and translator. Her translations include Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's We Are Green and Trembling (for which she won the National Book Award for translated literature), Andrés Neuman's Bariloche, Isabel Zapata's In Vitro, Eliana Hernández-Pachón's The Brush, and (with Sarah Booker) Cristina Rivera Garza's Death Takes Me.