Shortlisted for the Best Translated Fiction Book Award, 2017 Ms. Jufresa: Where the f*#! did you learn to tell a story so well?” Álvaro Enrigue, award-winning author of Sudden Death As heard on NPR's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon It started with a drowning. Deep in the heart of Mexico City, where five houses cluster around a sun-drenched courtyard, lives Ana, a precocious twelve-year-old who spends her days buried in Agatha Christie novels to forget the mysterious death of her little sister years earlier. Over the summer she decides to plant a milpa in her backyard, and as she digs the ground and plants her seeds, her neighbors in turn delve into their past. The ripple effects of grief, childlessness, illness and displacement saturate their stories, secrets seep out and questions emerge Who was my wife? Why did my Mom leave? Can I turn back the clock? And how could a girl who knew how to swim drown? In prose that is dazzlingly inventive, funny and tender, Laia Jufresa immerses us in the troubled lives of her narrators, deftly unpicking their stories to offer a darkly comic portrait of contemporary Mexico, as whimsical as it is heart-wrenching.

Umami

Literature & Fiction

Jufresa, Laia

Literary

Oneworld Publications

In five extraordinary apartments live five extraordinary families. Designed in the shape of a tongue, each apartment takes the name of a flavour – sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. And the tenants are no less eccentric. In Umami lives retired food anthropologist Alf, landlord and creator of the building. At Bitter lives manic depressive Marina, who neither eats nor paints but invents colours with words; at Sour lives newly parented (as well as New Age) couple Daniel and Daniela; and at Salty lives the Perez-Walkers with their daughter Ana, aka Agatha Christie, a precocious twelve-year-old who spends her days buried in detective novels to forget the unresolved death of her younger sister. Alf is also grappling with the death of a loved one. Recently bereaved, he types letters to his dead wife in the hope she will somehow respond, and together Alf and Ana lean on and support one another – until their lives threaten to spiral out of control. Darkly comic and dizzyingly inventive, Umami is a remarkable and heart-wrenching novel that is as compelling as it is whimsically devastating. Laia Jufresa’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Pen Atlas and Words Without Borders. In 2015 she was invited by the British Council to be the first ever International Writer in Residence at Hay Festival in Wales, and in the same year she was named as one of the most outstanding young writers in Mexico as part of the project México20. Umami is her first novel. She lives in Cologne, Germany. Sophie Hughes is a literary translator and editor living in Mexico City. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, PEN Atlas, and the White Review and her reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and Literary Review.

Umami: 'Guaranteed to challenge and move you' - Vogue

United States

UMAMI

Buchet/Chastel

Umami (Spanish Edition)

Random House Mondadori

Umami es el debut literario de Laia Jufresa y Publishers Weekly ya lo considera uno de los hot books del 2015. Ana quiere plantar una milpa en su traspatio, en pleno Distrito Federal. Pero en la tierra hay altos contenidos de plomo y la casa donde vive está plagada de ausencias. Su hermana murió, sus papás están de luto y sus hermanos de campamento; su única amiga se fue a buscar a quien la abandonó cuatro años atrás. Menos mal que queda Alfonso. Alfonso es un antropólogo especializado en alimentación prehispánica. Es viudo y dueño de la pequeña urbanización Campanario. Él mismo la diseñó a partir de un esquema de la lengua humana y dio a las casas el nombre de cada uno de los cinco sabores que percibimos: Dulce, Salado, Amargo, Ácido y Umami. En duelo, los habitantes de la comunidad desearían echar el tiempo atrás. Tejida al revés, esta novela se lo permite. Mientras Ana remueve la tierra y clava las semillas, sus vecinos hurgan en el pasado. Pero el traspatio de la memoria está minado con preguntas: ¿quién fue mi mujer? ¿Por qué se fue mi mamá? Y, ¿cómo es posible que se ahogara una niña que sabía nadar? ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Shortlisted for the Best Translated Fiction Book Award, 2017 “Ms. Jufresa: Where the f*#! did you learn to tell a story so well?” —Álvaro Enrigue, award-winning author of Sudden Death As heard on NPR's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon It started with a drowning. Deep in the heart of Mexico City, where five houses cluster around a sun-drenched courtyard, lives Ana, a precocious twelve-year-old who spends her days buried in Agatha Christie novels to forget the mysterious death of her little sister years earlier. Over the summer she decides to plant a milpa in her backyard, and as she digs the ground and plants her seeds, her neighbors in turn delve into their past. The ripple effects of grief, childlessness, illness and displacement saturate their stories, secrets seep out and questions emerge — Who was my wife? Why did my Mom leave? Can I turn back the clock? And how could a girl who knew how to swim drown? In prose that is dazzlingly inventive, funny and tender, Laia Jufresa immerses us in the troubled lives of her narrators, deftly unpicking their stories to offer a darkly comic portrait of contemporary Mexico, as whimsical as it is heart-wrenching.

Literatura Random House

Contemporary

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