When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep

Nítido Amán knows he was born in Guatemala, but he doesn't know where, or why his family left. Raised in the United States by his immigrant parents, he never asked them about his homeland as a child-and they never talked about it. When Nítido loses his father to Alzheimer's disease, his despondent mother grows increasingly silent. Realizing that his only links to the past are disappearing, he travels to Guatemala, against his mother's wishes, to see what he can uncover for himself.

He arrives in the tiny town of Río Roto, where he suspects his family came from, prepared to ask questions, and perhaps find work teaching there. But when he is mistaken for the new local priest, Nítido decides to play the part, thinking that the confessional confidences of the townspeople will prove more fruitful than ordinary conversation in leading him to the answers he seeks. What he finds in Río Roto, though, is a place shrouded in silence and secrets, a place that can neither escape nor give voice to the unnamed horrors it has survived. Nítido is at once determined and frightened to unearth these horrors-even as they force him to reevaluate his own haunted past.

In elegant, hypnotic prose, Sylvia Sellers-García delivers a story of divergent cultures and divided identities, of conflicts between generations and civilizations, of mourning, and, finally, of healing. When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep marks her arrival as a distinctive and powerful new voice.

"As Sellers-Garca's rich debut opens in 1993, Ntido Amn is seeking his origins in Guatemala following his father's death by spending a year as a teacher in the remote village of Ro Roto. His father had said that the Amns came from a place 'very near there,' but was never specific as to the family's home village. Upon arrival, Ntido is immediately mistaken for an arriving priest and is too tired at first to correct the man who meets his bus and settles him in the sacristry. When, the next morning, his innocent questions about the burned schoolhouse and the path to a certain village are met with evasion, stony silence and worse, Ntido begins to suspect that Ro Roto hides a deep trauma. On the third morning, when he is suddenly called in to give a woman last rites, Ntido, for reasons even he doesn't fully understand, tacitly accepts the role of priest. In a moving tale of mourning and revelation, Sellers-Garca puts Ntido's secret and hidden origins on a slow-motion collision course with the secrets of the town. While the pace is slowed by Ntido's letters to his dead father, this spare and vivid debut brings together wrenching personal and political histories." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

In elegant, hypnotic prose, Sellers-Garcia delivers a story of divergent cultures and divided identities, of conflicts between generations and civilizations, of mourning, and, finally, of healing.

Sylvia Sellers-Garcia has invented a rich and strange place, and her novel is possessed of a narrative voice that brings to mind the atmosphere and tension of Gabriel García Márquez's No One Writes to the Colonel. When the Ground Turn in Its Sleep is an extraordinarily assured novel. It's a mesmerizing debut. (Katharine Weber, author of Triangle and The Little Women)