Pink Slime - by Fernanda Trías (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Longlisted for the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for Translated Literature - Named a BEST BOOK of the Year by NPR, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, and ScreenRant - "The disconcerting familiarity of this strange, windswept world will haunt you." --Esquire

A hair-raising, poetic work of literary horror and climate fiction about a woman and the people who depend on her as the world around them edges toward apocalypse.

In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford--a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows--even if staying means being left behind.

An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, Pink Slime is buoyed by humor and its narrator's resiliency. This vivid and unforgettable translated novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge.

Review Quotes

"An intimate, melancholic look at an ecologically ravaged future."--Silvia Moreno-Garcia, New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic

"The disconcerting familiarity of this strange, windswept world will haunt you."--Esquire

"Elegantly translated...a well-imagined, often poetically beautiful plague story."--Lydia Millet, New York Times

"Even if you're wary of reading a pandemic novel, give this one, by Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías, a chance... Trías conveys the horror of mass illness perfectly in this enormously unsettling, but surprisingly beautiful, novel."--Michael Schaub, NPR

"A compulsively readable work of climate fiction."--Polygon

"A knockout of a story."--Kirkus (starred review)

"Pink Slime is a dystopia all too near to us, in which human connections and sadness over the end matter more than any explanation of the fog and disease that shroud everything. Trías's writing, precise and poetic, turns this beautiful novel into a toxic dream, into a meditation on ruins, bodies, and solitude."--Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

"Like a faintly distorting mirror, Pink Slime reflects back to us the image of a dying world. In this country, abandoned by God and government, the only consolation is the compassion and silent heroism of a few human beings. With her meticulous prose and the painful lucidity characteristic of her work, Fernanda Trías immerses us in a dystopia that expands around us like a poisonous perfume."--Guadalupe Nettel, author of Still Born, short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize

"Like a nightmare, like an omen, like the lines of an exquisite poem, Pink Slime echoes in my memory long after I read it. A book has never been so relevant, necessary, painful, and simply splendid."--Jazmina Barrera, author of Cross-Stitch

"Vivid... The novel captivates with its increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere, and Trías keenly explores the resentments that fester within a mother-daughter relationship, a failing marriage, and childcare work. Readers will be gripped."--Pubilsher's Weekly (starred review)

"An eerily calm tale...told in a conversational yet purposely discomfiting future subjunctive tense... With her eerie and unnervingly probable plot, strong narrative voice, and focus on the small, beautiful moments of life amid disaster, Trias's tale will continue to haunt readers long after they turn the final page."--Library Journal (starred review)

"A beautiful elegiac meditation on parenting - in this case, the deep connection between a mother and son."--Locus Magazine

International praise for Pink Slime

"This is not a dystopia, but a full-on, technicolor apocalypse... That we are in the company of someone who truly cares makes the horror all the more visceral."--The Scotsman

"Powerful and beautifully written, this is a disturbing read, depicting a terrifyingly convincing near-future scenario. The reader shares the achingly sad narrator's feelings as care-giver, daughter and ex-lover." --The Guardian

"Trías expertly encapsulates the relationship between mother and child, obligation and affection, and the conflation of fear with love."--Kill Your Darlings Magazine

"Latin American fantastika is in the midst of a remarkable renaissance. The latest of this string of exhilarating new books to find its way into English is Uruguayan novelist Fernanda Trias's Pink Slime."--The Saturday Paper

"It's a dystopic work worthy of JG Ballard, where even in hopelessness there remains a flickering shard of hope or resignation."--The Irish Times

"Precise, luminous, and powerful."--L'indipendente

"Fernanda Trías revisits the apocalyptic novel with subtlety and intelligence; not as a heroic epic of survival, but through intense emotions and a choice that must be made."--LH magazine

"[In this] novel--which belongs to that category of books that don't leave you once you've finished reading but rather force you to think of them, to keep returning to them--the stubbornness upon which we all depend in order to save ourselves, those we love, and our environment begins to emerge."--La Stampa

"After Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream and Mariana Enríquez's Our Share of Night, Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías completes a triptych of extraordinary works that have come to us in the last decade from the Rio de la Plata area. Three very different novels that nonetheless share the force with which they look straight into the abyss, maintaining the lucidity necessary to focus on each revealing detail."--L'Indice

"Intoxicating."--Lire

"Pink Slime, like all truly great novels, etches itself indelibly onto the sensitive plate of one's mind."--Transfuge

About the Author

Fernanda Trías is an award-winning Uruguayan writer based in Colombia, and the author of four novels and two short story collections. Her novels The Rooftop and Pink Slime have been published in English, and translation rights to her work have been sold in twenty languages. Pink Slime was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and received Uruguay's National Literature Prize, the Bartolomé Hidalgo Critics' Award, and Mexico's Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. In 2025, Trías became only the second writer in the history of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize to win the award twice, receiving it for The Mountain Woman, which was widely featured on best-of-the-year lists across the Spanish-speaking world.

Heather Cleary, a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, is a translator of poetry and prose from Spanish whose work has been recognized by the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, the National Book Foundation, English PEN, and the International Booker Prize, among others. The author of The Translator's Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction, she holds a PhD from Columbia University and is currently writing a novel about translation and betrayal.