A lyrically haunting and powerful account of women surviving femicide and destruction in Mexico, using fantasy to relate atrocities that exist beyond language.
From the award-winning author of the highly praised novel, Fury, one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Best Books of 2024 and an Indie Next Pick.
Silencio tells the story of Águeda, a young woman mourning the death of her mother. When the townspeople deny her a grave in the local cemetery, the mother’s body vanishes. Águeda knows her father is hiding it, and when she confronts him, he punishes her defiance with confinement.
Serving her sentence in a house, Águeda lives within those walls as if in a second maternal womb—one that will transform her. In chapters alternating between the real and the imaginary, she mourns the destroyed futures of those who were silenced as she listens to her neighbors’ stories of loss—a child worker; a boy from the Tacuate community; and Mexican refugees in Canada. Through the walls, she senses the world: birds in dialogue, the beauty of the arid landscape, experiences of love and devastation. She comes to realize that in this mountain region that resembles the author’s hometown of Oaxaca, where organized crime holds sway, many—like her—mourn their dead and search for the disappeared.
In her second book to be translated into English, Clyo Mendoza transcends the limits of language and realism to represent with lyric brutality the unspeakable violence in towns where narcotrafficking rules.
CLYO MENDOZA (Oaxaca, México, 1993) is a poet and novelist. She is the author of the poetry collections Anamnesis (2016) and Silencio (2018), which was awarded the Premio Internacional de Poesía Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz, and the novel Furia (2021), which was awarded the Premio Javier Morote by the Confederación Española de Gremios y Asociaciones de Libreros and the Amazon Premio Primera Novela. She has contributed to numerous poetry anthologies, including Poetas parricidas (Cuadrivio, 2014), Los reyes Subterráneos: Veinte poetas jóvenes de México (La Bella Varsovia, 2015), and Liberoamericanas: 80 poetas contemporáneas (Liberoamérica, 2018). Mendoza is the recipient of scholarships from the Mexican Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes and the Fundación Antonio Gala, in Córdoba, Spain. She has also collaborated on various transdisciplinary projects and experiments with painting, photography, and sound collage.
Christina MacSweeney has an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia. Her work has been recognized in a number of important awards. Her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize and also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award (2017). Her most recent translations include fiction and nonfiction works by Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Karla Suárez, and Jazmina Barrera, whose autobiographical text, Linea Nigra, is, at the time of writing, a double finalist in the NBCC awards (translation and autobiography). She has also contributed to anthologies of Latin American literature and published translations, articles, and interviews on a variety of platforms.
