Eating Ashes

‘Stunning… An energetic and harrowing new voice.’ Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows

A young man jumps five floors to his death. His sister tries to understand why. A searing novel about abandonment, belonging and migration, from an exciting new Latin American voice.

Five floors, six seconds, a body crashing to the ground. When our narrator’s younger brother, Diego, takes his own life, she retreats into memories of the past, asking herself again and again: why? Revisiting their early years in Mexico, their childhood in Spain and the fragmentation and displacement that coloured their adult years, she pieces together a story of alienation and loss, but also of belonging, courage and hope. 

Now, she has to return to Mexico with Diego’s ashes in hand. She finds a country that looks very different from the one she left behind and asks what it means to return to a home that never felt like one.

Eating Ashes is a tender, deeply poignant novel, shot through with flashes of dark humour, from a powerful new Latin American voice.

Author Biography

BRENDA NAVARRO was born in Mexico City. She studied Sociology and Feminist Economics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She has a Masters in Gender Studies from the University of Barcelona. In 2016 she founded #EnjambreLiterario, a group of authors who promote writing by women. Brenda is a scriptwriter and regular contributor to El Pais newspaper and other outlets. She lives in Madrid.

MEGAN McDOWELL has translated books by many contemporary South American and Spanish authors, and her translations have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Paris Review. She lives in Chile.