Astra House Fall 2023 Catalog

MISSION

Astra House is dedicated to publishing authors across genres and from around the world.

Founded in 2020, Astra House’s mission is to advocate for authors who experience their subject deeply and personally, and who have a strong point of view; writers who represent multifaceted expressions of intellectual thought and personal experience, and who can introduce readers to new perspectives about their everyday lives as well as the lives of others. Astra House is the adult trade imprint of Astra Publishing House.

Fall 2023

Slow Down Kohei Saito

THE DECELERATION MANIFESTO

TRANSLATED BY BRIAN

BERGSTROM

In the spirit of big idea books by Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy, and a runaway bestseller in Japan, Slow Down is a bold and urgent call for a return to Marxism in order to stop climate change.

Why, in our affluent society, are so many people living in poverty, without access to health care, working multiple jobs and still unable to make ends meet, with no good prospects for the future as the planet is burning?

In his international bestseller, Kohei Saito argues that while unfettered capitalism is often blamed for inequality and climate change, calls for “sustainable growth” and a “Green New Deal” are a dangerous compromise. Capitalism creates artificial scarcity by pursuing profit based on the value of products rather than their usefulness and by putting perpetual growth above all else. It is therefore impossible to reverse climate change in a capitalist society—more: the system that caused the problem in the first place can not be an integral part of the solution.

NONFICTION | POLITICAL SCIENCE

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662602368

PUB DATE: January 9, 2024

304pp

Price: $27 US / $36 CAN

Instead, Saito advocates for degrowth and deceleration, which he conceives as the slowing of economic activity through the democratic reform of labor and production. In practical terms, he argues for the end of mass production and mass consumption, decarbonization through shorter working hours, and the prioritization of essential labor (such as caregiving) over corporate profits. By returning to a system of social ownership, he argues, we can restore abundance and focus on those activities that are essential for human life, effectively reversing climate change and saving the planet.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KOHEI SAITO is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He received his PhD in philosophy from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2016. He was awarded the 2018 Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize and the prestigious Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Prize in 2020. Capital in the Anthropocene (which we are calling Slow Down) received “Best Asian Books of the Year” in the Asia Book Awards 2021.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

BRIAN BERGSTROM is a lecturer and translator currently based in Montréal after living in Chicago, Kyoto, and Yokohama. His writings and translations have appeared in publications including Granta, Asymptote Aperture, Japan Forum and The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

Candelaria Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

A sweeping, mystical novel following three generations of women as they grapple with muddled pasts and predetermined futures, Candelaria is a story of love that eats us alive from the author of Dreaming of You, Melissa Lozada-Oliva.

Your granddaughters are lost, Candelaria. Bianca, the brainy archaeologist, had to forfeit her life’s work in Guatemala after her advisor seduced and deserted her. Paola, missing for over a decade, resurfaces in Boston as a brainwashed wellness cultist named Zoe. And Candy, the youngest, is a recovering addict who finds herself pregnant by a man she’s not even sure ever existed. None of this concerns you of course, until a cataclysmic earthquake hits Boston. Now you must traverse the crumbling city to reach the Watertown Mall Old Country Buffet—for a reason you still cannot disclose—battling strange entities and your own strange past to save your granddaughters and possibly the world.

Told with tongue-in-cheek humor and sharp cultural critique, Candelaria is an unsettling, raucous debut novel that unearths one troubled family’s legacy, feasting on diasporic identity politics and examining the limits of bodily autonomy and the dangers of wanting to belong at any cost.

FICTION

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662601804

PUB DATE: September 19, 2023

224pp

Price: $26 US / $35 CAN

PRAISE FOR Dreaming of You

“The novel is narrated in verse, a device that could feel gimmicky in less capable hands than Lozada-Oliva’s, but instead melds with the macabre-yet-gossipy subject matter to create an unforgettable portrait of a public figure who to many seemed larger than life.” —Emma Specter, Vogue

“A macabre love story that casts an inquisitive eye on Latinidad, womanhood, and celebrity worship.” —Keely Weiss, Harper’s Bazaar

“Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s surreal novel-in-verse is sure to delight and surprise readers . . . You may know and love Selena’s voice, but Lozada-Oliva’s is utterly new, original, and worth hearing, too.” —Elena Nicolaou, Oprah Daily

MELISSA LOZADA-OLIVA is the child of Guatemalan and Colombian immigrants and the author of Dreaming of You and peluda Her work has been featured in NPR, Vogue Harper’s Bazaar PAPER Armani Beauty, and more. She is a member of the band Meli and the Specs. She holds an MFA in poetry from NYU and lives in New York City.

“An enjoyably madcap journey through the wasteland of fame, popular culture, and feminine identity in a post-colonial world.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind Molly McGhee

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662602115

PUB DATE: October 17, 2023

272pp

Price: $26 US / $35 CAN

MOLLY MCGHEE is from a cluster of unincorporated towns outside of Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia University. Currently living in Brooklyn, her work has appeared in The Paris Review. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is her first novel.

For readers of Patricia Lockwood and Ling Ma, a debut novel for the modern working stiff.

Jonathan Abernathy is a loser . . . he’s behind on his debts, he has no prospects, no friends, no redeeming qualities. But when a government loan forgiveness program offers him a literal dream job, he thinks he’s found his big break. If he can appear to be competent at his new job, entering the minds of middle class workers while they sleep and removing the unsavory detritus of their waking lives from their unconscious, he might have a chance at a new life. As he finds his footing in this new role, reality and morality begin to warp around him. Soon, the lines between life and work, love and hate, right and wrong, even sleep and consciousness, begin to blur.

With all the dramatic irony of Charlie Kaufman as written by Kurt Vonnegut, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind touches on a theme most people know all too well—the relentlessly crushing weight of debt. A workplace novel, at once tender, startling, and deeply funny, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is borne of its milieu, for those readers who see something of themselves in its protagonist.

With a keen sense of her readers, a wry wit, and an undeniable dexterity with language, Molly McGhee’s debut novel is a piercing critique of late-stage capitalism and a reckoning with its true cost.

PRAISE FOR Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

“Molly McGhee reminds me of absolutely no one. Here’s an original mind brimming over with invention and comic ferocity and a new world sensibility that serves to remind us what good hands the future of literature is in. I am hugely excited for everyone to read this mad, hilarious writer.” —Ben Marcus, Guggenheim Fellow and author of The Flame Alphabet

“The fiction of Molly McGhee is funny, freaky, intellectually bold and always from the heart. McGhee has seen enough of the world to know that you’ve got to start some trouble in it. She also knows that seeing the humor in our personal foibles and social absurdities (cruel as the latter often are), will always be a powerful way to commiserate with your fellow humans. Here is a writer who is keenly aware of what we’ve all got coming, but in the meantime is never afraid to laugh and live and fight on the page.” —Sam Lipsyte, Guggenheim Fellow and The New York Times Bestselling author of The Ask

“In the light of this insightfully nightmarish parable of the pervasive ravages of debt, Abernathy’s optimism, and the serene pace of McGhee’s prose, are stone cold chilling.” —Halle Butler, Granta Best Young American Novelist and author of The New Me

Happy Celina Baljeet Basra

For fans of Vikas Swarup and Charles Yu, the story of a starry-eyed cinephile who leaves his rural village in Punjab to pursue his dreams—a formally daring debut novel set against the global migration crisis.

In a farming village in Punjab, India, our moony young hero crouches over his phone in a rapeseed field near the cell tower, listening out for the occasional rattlesnake. His name is Happy Singh Soni, and he’s watching YouTube clips of his favorite film, Bande à Part by Jean-Luc Godard. Happy is often compared to a young Sami Frey by the imaginary journalists that keep him company while he uses the family outhouse. Pooing, as he says, “en plein air.” When he’s not sleeping among the cabbages and eating sugary rotis, Happy dreams of becoming an actor, one who plays the melancholy roles; sad, pretty boys, rare in Indian cinema. After an amusement park buys up the neighboring farms, and his family is fractured by the hard and soft forces of globalization, Happy saves money for a clandestine journey to Europe, where he’ll finally land a breakout role. Little does he know, his immigration is being coordinated by a transnational crime syndicate.

After a nightmarish passage to Italy, Happy still manages to find relief in food and fantasy, even as he is forced into ever-worsening work conditions over a debt he allegedly accrued in transit. But his daydreams grow increasingly at odds with his bleak reality, one shared by so many migrant workers disenfranchised by the systems that depend on their labor.

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662602306

PUB DATE: November 14, 2023

280pp

Price: $26 US / $35 CAN

At turns funny and heartbreaking, sunny and tragic, Happy is a formally ambitious novel about the psychic fissures produced by the splintering of nations, and the lovely, generative, artful coping mechanisms created by generations of diasporic people. With this ingenious, daringly cinematic debut, Celina Baljeet Basra argues for the things that are basic to human survival: food, water, shelter, but also pleasure, romance, art, and the right to a vivid inner life.

THE AUTHOR

CELINA BALJEET BASRA is a writer and curator based in Berlin. Since graduating from Free University of Berlin with a degree in Art History, she has worked with Berlin Biennale, Academy of the Arts Berlin, Times Art Center Berlin, Art Night London, Nature Morte Delhi, and other institutions. She is a founder of The Department of Love, a curatorial collective.

Do You Remember Being Born? Sean Michaels

Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels’s moving, innovative and deeply felt novel about an aging poet who agrees to collaborate with a Big Tech company’s poetry AI, named Charlotte

Marian Ffarmer is a world-renowned poet and a legend in the making; only now that she’s getting on in years, in the tender half of her life, can she finally believe in the security of her hard-earned successes. But for a poet, these successes don’t necessarily translate to capital, and as her adult son struggles to purchase his first home, she’s left to ponder the impact of her choices. Marian’s pristine life of mind—for which she’s sacrificed nearly all personal relationships, from romance to friendship to motherhood—has come at no insignificant cost.

Then comes a cryptic invitation from the Tech Company. Come to California, the invitation beckons, and write with a machine. The Company’s lucrative offer—for Marian to co-author a poem in a ‘historic partnership’ with their highly intelligent poetry bot, named Charlotte—chafes at everything she believes about artmaking as an individual pursuit . . . yet, it’s a second chance she can’t resist. And so to California she goes, a sell-out and a skeptic. But as unexpectedly welcome to Marian as suddenly being a financially reliable parent is her generative, growing fascination with the strange, inquisitive, and artificially intelligent Charlotte.

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662602320

PUB DATE: September 5, 2023

296pp

Price: $27 US

Both a love letter to and interrogation of the nature of language, art, labor, money, family, and community, Do You Remember Being Born? is Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels’s empathetic response to some of the most unsettling questions of our time. As AI increasingly encroaches on our work, creative, and personal lives, this novel is a defiant and joyful recognition that if we’re to survive meaningfully at all, finitude is to be embraced, creative legacy to be reimagined, and belonging to one’s art must mean, above all else, belonging to the world.

SEAN MICHAELS is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. His debut novel, Us Conductors (Tin House), received the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and was nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the Kirkus Prize, among other awards. Sean’s award-winning writing has also appeared in The Observer, McSweeney’s, The Guardian, Pitchfork and more.

The Parenthood Dilemma Gina Rushton

PROCREATION IN THE AGE OF UNCERTAINTY

NONFICTION | SOCIAL SCIENCE

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662602320

PUB DATE: September 19, 2023

256pp

Price: US $27 / CAN $36

A bold feminist investigation into the mother of all questions; whether or not to become a parent in these turbulent times.

Should we become parents?

This timeless question forces us to reckon with who we are and what we love and fear most in ourselves, in our relationships, and in the world as it is now and as it will be.

When Gina Rushton admitted she had little time left to make the decision for herself, the magnitude of the choice overwhelmed her. Her search for her own “yes” or “no” only uncovered more questions to be answered. How do we clearly consider creating a new life on a planet facing catastrophic climate change? How do we reassess the gender roles we have been assigned at birth and by society? How do we balance ascending careers with declining fertility? How do we know if we’ve found the right co-parent, or if we want to go it alone, or if we don’t want to do it at all?

To seek clarity on these questions, Rushton spoke to doctors, sociologists, economists, and ethicists, as well as parents and childless people of all ages and from around the world. Here, she explores and presents policies, data, and case studies from people who have made this decision—one way or the other—and shows how the process can be revelatory in discovering who we are as individuals.

Drawing on the depth of knowledge afforded by her body of work as an awardwinning journalist on the abortion beat, Rushton wrote the book that she needed, and we all need, to stop a panicked internal monologue and start a genuine dialogue about what we want from our lives and why.

PRAISE FOR The Parenthood Dilemma

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GINA RUSHTON is a reproductive rights and women’s health reporter and editor whose work has been published in BuzzFeed News The Guardian, Vogue, Associated Press, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Monthly. This is her first book.

“Gina Rushton interrogates the most personal, political and primal anxieties of our generation, and delivers a clarity so sharp, it borders on pain. But the pain is transformative when shared and given shape, and I read this book feeling nothing short of seen, consoled and grateful.”

—Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law

Her Side of the Story Alba de Céspedes

TRANSLATED

BY

JILL FOULSTON

FICTION

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662601439

PUB DATE: October 10, 2023

500pp

Price: $27 US / $36 CAN

“De Céspedes’ work has lost none of its subversive force.”

With an afterword by Elena Ferrante

From the author of Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes, a richly told novel she called “the story of a great love and of a crime.”

As she looks back on her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in Italy, the resistance, and the fall of Mussolini, the lives of the women in her family and her working-class neighborhood, rigorously committed to telling “her side of the story.”

Alessandra witnesses her mother, an aspiring concert pianist, suffer from the inability to escape her oppressive marriage. Later, she is sent away to live with her father’s relatives in the country, in the hope she’ll finally learn to submit herself to the patriarchal system and authority. But at the farm, Alessandra grows increasingly rebellious, conscious of the unjust treatment of generations of hardworking women in her family. When she refuses the marriage proposal from a neighboring farmer, she is sent back to Rome to tend to her ailing father.

In Rome, Alessandra meets Francesco, a charismatic anti-fascist professor, who ostensibly admires and supports her sense of independence and justice. But she soon comes to recognize that even as she respects Francesco and is keen to participate in his struggle to reclaim their country from fascism, this respect is unrequited, and that her own beloved husband is ensnared by patriarchal conventions when it comes to their relationship.

In these pages, De Céspedes delivers a breathtakingly accurate and timeless portrayal of the complexity of the female condition against the dramatic backdrop of WWII and the partisan uprising in Italy

PRAISE FOR Forbidden Notebook

“A brilliant, quietly tumultuous book and a welcome revival of an author too little known in the anglophone world.” —Toby Lichtig, The Wall Street Journal

ALBA DE CÉSPEDES (1911 – 1997)

was a bestselling Cuban-Italian feminist writer greatly influenced by the cultural developments that lead to and resulted from World War II. In 1935 and again in 1943, she was jailed for her anti-fascist activities in Italy. After the war, she moved to Paris, where she lived until her death in 1997.

“Astounding . . . Forbidden Notebook does not feel 71 years old. Its prose is fresh and lively, and the issues it raises more contemporary than many would hope.”

—Lily Meyer, NPR

—Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review

JILL FOULSTON is the translator of novels by Erri de Luca, Augusto de Angelis and Piero Chiara.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Fire in the Canyon Daniel Gumbiner

A new novel from National Book Award nominee Daniel Gumbiner about a California grape-grower, his family, and the climate disaster that upends their quiet lives.

Since his release from prison after serving an eighteen-month sentence for growing cannabis, Ben Hecht’s life has settled into a familiar routine. On his farm in the foothills of California, he stays busy cultivating a dozen acres of grapes and tending to a flock of mistrustful sheep. Meanwhile, from her desk in their old redwood barn, his novelist wife, Ada, continues to work on what may be her most important book yet. When their only son, Yoel, comes home from Los Angeles for a rare visit, Ben is forced to confront their long troubled relationship, which has continued to degrade in recent years. But before the two of them can truly address their past, a wildfire sweeps through the region, forcing the Hecht family to flee to the coast, and setting into motion a chain of events that will transform them all.

This is a story about grape growing and wine, financial and familial struggles, and the peculiar characters and unlikely heroes one will always find in small-town California. Through the experiences of the Hechts and the escalating challenges that face their community, Fire in the Canyon is an intimate look at the lives of those already living through the climate crisis.

FICTION

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662602429

PUB DATE: October 3, 2023

304pp

Price: $27 US / $37 CAN

PRAISE FOR The Boatbuilder

“The Boatbuilder offers a decidedly gentle, sometimes quietly rewarding window onto the attempted recovery of an American opioid addict. It’s a fictional companion piece of sorts to nonfiction books about self-reliance like Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft or Alexander Langlands’s Craeft, which argue for the emotional benefits of unplugging and working with your hands. Capturing those interior benefits in fiction is a delicate act.” —John

Williams, The New York Times

“A striking portrayal of addiction, self-determination, and community. It is lively, meditative, often hilarious, and refreshingly unsentimental.” The Brooklyn Rail

DANIEL GUMBINER’s first book, The Boatbuilder, was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the California Book Awards. A 2022-23 Hermitage Fellow, he lives in Oakland, CA and works as the editor of The Believer.

“A testament to Gumbiner’s fine writing, readers will easily slip into Berg’s dayto-day existence; Gumbiner relays Berg’s ambivalence, desperation, and anxiety without resorting to over-the-top scenarios or dialogue. He allows his characters and small-town setting to shine in this beautiful novel about finding one’s place, no matter how small, in the world.” —Kathy

Sexton, Booklist

Seeing Chai Jing

A MEMOIR OF TRUTH AND COURAGE FROM CHINA’S MOST INFLUENTIAL TELEVISION JOURNALIST

NONFICTION

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662600678

PUB DATE: August 8, 2023

304pp

Price: $27 US / $36 CAN

In the tradition of Katy Tur, Jane Pauley, and Peter Jennings, Chai Jing shows us the power of television news and the complex challenges of reporting in China.

After becoming a radio DJ in college and a TV interviewer at 23, Chai Jing is thrust into the spotlight when she takes on a position as a news anchor at CCTV, China’s official state news channel. Chai struggles to find her role in a male-dominated news organization, discovering corruption, courage, and hope within the people she meets while honing her talent for getting people to reveal themselves to her.

In eleven propulsive and deeply felt chapters, Chai recounts her investigations into SARS quarantine wards, a childhood suicide epidemic, the human cost of industrial pollution, and organized crime, while looking back at her growth as a journalist. Chai Jing shares the philosophical and emotional complexity of the ethical challenges that are always present in such revealing reporting, while she also finds hope and purpose, time and again, in the vital and intimate stories of her interviewees.

This candid memoir from one of China’s best-known journalists provides a rare window into the issues which concern us most, and which face contemporary China and the whole world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAI JING is an award-winning reporter and television host in China. In 2007, she won the National Green People Award for her coverage of pollution in her hometown. Seeing has sold over 5 million copies since its Chinese publication in 2012. In 2015, Chai Jing was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, and one of the top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy

José Falero Pedro and Marques Take Stock

A PICARESQUE NOVEL

TRANSLATED BY JULIA SANCHES

FICTION

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662601231

PUB DATE: November 7, 2023

176pp

Price: $23 US/ $30 CAN

City of God meets Kevin Smith’s Clerks in this debut novel set in the favelas of Brazil where the lives of two supermarket stock clerks are upturned when their small-time marijuana business takes off.

A modern-day Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Pedro and Marques stumble through their days in the rough and rundown favelas of Porto Alegre unloading trucks, restocking shelves, and dreaming of a better life, of breaking the cycle of poverty that has afflicted their families and their community. Well-acquainted with the drug dealers in their neighborhood, and seeing an opportunity to earn a little extra cash, they decide to start a weed-dealing business.

Almost too easily, the two men build a thriving enterprise and get rich, quickly. As their sales grow from dime-bags to kilos, the wit and charm they once used to run their business turns into violence and intimidation. Cracks in their carefully crafted and seemingly untouchable world begin to show, culminating into one final, lethal showdown.

A witty, voice-driven, and electrifying portrait of poverty; a canny examination of the ethics of drug dealing and low-wage labor in the underbelly of Brazil, Pedro and Marques Take Stock is a contemporary picaresque novel of class and crime.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSÉ FALERO lives in Porto

Alegre, Brazil. He is the author of Vila Sapo, a story collection published by Todavia in 2019, and Mas em que mundo tu vive? a collection of essays published by Todavia in 2021. The English translation of his story collection is forthcoming from Astra House. Pedro and Marques Take Stock is his first work to be translated into English.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

JULIA SANCHES translates literature from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English.

Ery Shin Spring on the Peninsula

A sexually fluid narrator mourns a failed relationship over the course of two harsh winters in this raw, unprecedented portrait of millennials living in Seoul.

The time is roughly now in Seoul, and Kai, a bisexual white-collar worker, has just been abandoned by his longtime lover. Follow him through the city’s alleyways as he reels from this sudden departure. Walk with him up snowy mountains where he contemplates ending his own life. That mourning can be both a sensuous and revelatory art is epitomized in the paths that Kai crosses and the lives he alters for better or worse.

Kai is not the only one feeling disoriented and aimless these days. Those in his inner circle similarly experience personal crises as they go through their thirties in a nation simmering with class and generational tensions, as well as the specter of new and old wars. The center of Kai’s heartbreak, Seoul in all of its millennial glory and turmoil, is brought to the forefront in austere, visceral prose. Doing for Seoul what Kathy Acker and Constance de Jong once did for New York City, Ery Shin offers rare insight into the psyches of those in and around the margins, living under the contemporary geopolitical tensions of the peninsula—her characters are sexually fluid, depraved, nihilistic, impotent, prone to violence and obsessed with suicide. The result is a phantasmagorical story and a poignant meditation on queer life in a city beset by North Korea’s shadow.

FICTION

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662602221

PUB DATE: December 5, 2023

272pp

Price: $27 US / $36 US

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ERY SHIN was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1986, and raised in Manhattan for the first decade of her life, then Seoul for the second. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Princeton University and a doctorate from the University of Oxford. She is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. Spring on the Peninsula is her first novel.

PAPERBACK

Andrea Abreu Dogs of Summer

TRANSLATED BY JULIA SANCHES

FICTION

PAPERBACK

ISBN: 9781662602450

PUB DATE: August 8, 2023

192pp

Price: $15 US / $21 CAN

“[A] firecracker of a debut . . . Abreu’s novel, in Julia Sanches’s sparkling translation, is a revelation, perfectly capturing a festering summer of meltdowns and shrinking horizons.”

—The New York Times

My Brilliant Friend meets Blue is the Warmest Color in this lyrical debut novel set in a working-class neighborhood of the Canary Islands—a story about two girls coming of age in the early aughts and a friendship that simmers into erotic desire over the course of one hot summer.

High near the volcano of northern Tenerife, an endless ceiling of cloud cover traps the working class in an abject, oppressive heat. Far away from the island’s posh resorts, two girls dream of hitching a ride down to the beach and escaping their horizonless town.

It’s summer, 2005, and our ten-year-old narrator is consumed by thoughts of her best friend Isora. Isora is rude and bossy, but she’s also vivacious and brave; grownups prefer her, and boys do, too. That’s why sometimes she gets jealous of Isora, who already has hair on her vagina and soft, round breasts. But she’s definitely not jealous that Isora’s mother is dead, nor that Isora’s fat, foulmouthed grandmother has her on a diet, so that she is constantly sticking her fingers down her throat. Besides, she would do anything for Isora: gorge herself on cakes when her friend wants to watch, follow her to the bathroom when she takes a shit, log into chat rooms to swap dirty instant messages with strangers. But increasingly, our narrator finds it hard to keep up with Isora, who seems to be growing up at full tilt without her—and as her submissiveness veers into a painful sexual awakening, desire grows indistinguishable from intimate violence.

Braiding prose poetry with bachata lyrics and the gritty humor of Canary dialect, Dogs of Summer is a story of exquisite yearning, a brutal picture of girlhood and a love song written for the vital community it portrays.

PRAISE FOR Dogs of Summer

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ANDREA ABREU was born in 1995 in Tenerife, Spain. In 2021, Granta named her one of the best Spanish writers under the age of thirty-five. Dogs of Summer, her debut novel, will be translated into thirteen languages and adapted for the screen by El Estudio.

“Emotionally resonant . . . Abreu’s exhilarating chronicle of a young friendship is not to be missed.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“In playful language, Abreu beautifully evokes a land of ‘light stored for so many thousands of years,’ and an era of telenovelas and the birth of the internet, in which Pokémon and Bratz dolls give way to sexual discovery.”

—John Self, The Guardian

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

JULIA SANCHES translates literature from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English.