The Summer of the Serpent - by Cecilia Eudave (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Summer of the Serpent

"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

"Eudave weaves her ars poetica from threads of wonder and the uncanny, where the marvelous appears in every action of the protagonists, alongside chance and the inexorable verdict of a labyrinthine past and future--filled with secrets that demand to be revealed and destinies that must be fulfilled."
--Alberto González, Nexos

About the Author

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.

Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Her translations have appeared in Granta, The Baffler, Kenyon Review, The Common, Harvard Review, Two Lines, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, she was longlisted twice for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry and among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets). As a poet, Robin is the author of the forthcoming Centro. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2022, Guernica, The Drift, Poetry London, Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, Annulet Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, and other journals. She is an alumna of the Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Literary Translation Centre, the Community of Writers, and Under the Volcano.