Umami
About this book
WINNER of a PEN Translates Award
SHORTLISTED for the Best Translated Book Awards 2016
Translated into English by Sophie Hughes
Umami is a captivating portrait of contemporary Mexico, cut through with dazzling wit and sensitivity.
It started with a drowning.
Deep in the heart of Mexico City, where five houses cluster around a sun-drenched courtyard, lives Ana, a precocious twelve-year-old still coming to terms with the mysterious death of her little sister years earlier. Over the rainy, smoggy summer she decides to plant a vegetable garden in the courtyard, and as she digs the ground and plants her seeds, her neighbours in turn delve into their past. As the ripple effects of grief, childlessness, illness and displacement saturate their stories, secrets seep out and questions emerge – Who was my wife? Why did my mom leave? Can I turn back the clock? And how could a girl who knew how to swim drown?
Using five voices to tell the singular story of life in an inner-city mews, Umami is a quietly devastating novel of missed encounters, missed opportunities, missed people, and those who are left behind. Compassionate, surprising, funny and inventive, it deftly unpicks their stories to offer a darkly comic portrait of contemporary Mexico, as whimsical as it is heart-wrenching.
Praise for Umami:
"Reading Umami is like traveling through the minds of everyone we know, guided by a soft, reliable voice that tells us: stop, listen, observe."
- Valeria Luiselli
"This book is such a gentle and sensitive deep dive into the cycles of mourning and loss out of which families are made and unmade, terrifying and uncanny, without ever losing sight of the daily banalities of hearth and home and love. Cooked to perfection, ready to serve."
- Literary Hub
"A wonderfully surprising novel, powered by wit, exuberance and nostalgia."
- Chloe Aridjis
"Jufresa's evocative portrait of contemporary Mexico blends whimsy with poignancy. Guaranteed to challenge and move you."
- Vogue
Publishers
- Original publisher Spanish: Literatura Random House/PRH
- English: Oneworld
- Chinese: United Sky
- Danish: Skjødt Forlag
- Dutch: Atlas
- Finnish: Fabriikki Kustannus
- French: Buchet Chastel
- Italian: Edizioni SUR
- Polish: Wydawnictwo W.A.B.
- Spanish(Audio): Audible
- Spanish (Chile): Kindberg
- Turkish: Bence Kitap
About the client & agent
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