-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
by Cecilia Eudave
A kaleidoscopic descent into the small violences and hidden horrors of a sweltering Guadalajara summer.
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.
"Satisfying and thought-provoking...Readers will be grateful for the introduction to this distinctive writer." —Publishers Weekly
"[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 hypnotic and transporting read and a powerful, impressionistic portrait of a place and time." —CrimeReads
"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
"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
This information about The Summer of the Serpent was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
If you liked The Summer of the Serpent, try these:
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
