The Summer of the Serpent

Praise for Summer of the Serpent

A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of Spring
A CrimeReads Most Anticipated Book of Summer

“Spine-tingling, atmospherically uneasy, disturbingly twisty, and more … Eudave’s novel is more concerned with the evil that coexists just beneath the surface … what causes cruelty, the evolutionary drive of gratification, the difference between our real lives and how we perceive ourselves, and the ways we strive to cling to life without fading into irrelevance or dissatisfaction.”
—Words Without Borders

“The Summer of the Serpent creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of the past within the blurriness of memory and myth. This beautifully fragmented novel twists the mesmerizing shape of combined truths during the moments when childhood innocence dissipates.”
—Electric Lit

“One you read in a single sitting and then think about every time the air gets too hot.”
—Sass Magazine

“Satisfying and thought-provoking … Readers will be grateful for the introduction to this distinctive writer.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A hypnotic and transporting read and a powerful, impressionistic portrait of a place and time.”
—CrimeReads

“[Cecilia] Eudave’s brief novel is intense, tightly layered, and unsettling as it slithers through familiar Latin American literary tropes, shedding its skin like a serpent to give them fresh life … Here, traditional logic is unreliable, death is an obsession, and the line between reality and the fantastic is porous.”
—Booklist

“A gorgeous, strange, kaleidoscopic book of wonders. This spare novel is a feat of magic, and its author is a true visionary.”
—Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Paradiso 17

“A voice that knows how to narrate, from a place of tenderness, humor, and amazement, the wonderful absurdity of being alive.”
—Patricia Esteban Erlés, author of Las Madres Negras

“Eudave weaves her ars poetica from threads of wonder and the uncanny, where the marvelous appears in every action of the protagonists, alongside chance and the inexorable verdict of a labyrinthine past and future—filled with secrets that demand to be revealed and destinies that must be fulfilled.”
—Alberto González, Nexos

“Eudave layers everyday life with the anomalous until normality itself begins to fracture … A many-voiced narrative that dismantles the illusion of normal life and exposes the darkness beneath childhood.”
—Milenio

“A labyrinthine, spectral novel that embodies a contemporary poetics of the unusual. Eudave sketches a larger, astonishing reality—one that coils sinuously around the human world.”
—Panoptista

“A novel that inhabits many times at once—a ghostly warning that transforms the reader.”
—El Mostrador

Cecilia Eudave lives in Guadalajara, Mexico, and teaches at the Universidad de Guadalajara. She is the author of the story collections Tecnicamente humanos, En primera persona, and Registro de imposibles, as well as the novel Bestiaria vida, which won the Juan Garcia 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.

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