Synopses & Reviews
"A story of the world's repeated failure to control feminine power and the sheer magic of language itself. An enthralling, passionate story about secrets both holy and profane." Catherine Lacey, author of Pew and Nobody Is Ever Missing
Paloma is dead. But before she was murdered, before she was even Paloma, she was a traditional healer named Gaspar. Before she was murdered, she taught her cousin Feliciana the secrets of the ceremonies known as veladas, and about the Language and the Book that unlock their secrets.
Sent to report on Paloma's murder, Zoe meets Feliciana in the mountain village of San Felipe. There, the two women's lives twist around each other in a danse macabre. Feliciana tells Zoe the story of her struggle to become an accepted healer in her community, and Zoe begins to understand the hidden history of her own experience as a woman, finding her way in a hostile environment shaped by and for men.
Weaving together two parallel narratives that mirror and refract one another, this extraordinary novel envisions the healer as storyteller and the writer as healer, and offers a generous and nuanced understanding of a world that can be at turns violent and exultant, cruel and full of hope.
Review
“Alternating between the quotidian and the incantatory, Witches weaves together two personal and political histories, casting a potent spell of fury and curiosity, heartache and healing. Sibylline, rich, and incredibly precise in its construction, Witches exhibits Lozano's total mastery of her art on every page, insisting on the primacy and power of storytelling, and the right of all Others to claim it.” Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion
Review
“Lozano is a marvellous writer, bright, funny, subtly perverse, always moving.” Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder
Review
"I've always wanted to encounter a voice like this in literature, a contemporary bruja oaxaqueña, without folklore or cliché, with true feeling, complexity, and poetry. It feels like discovering that Juan Rulfo has transformed into a twenty-first century woman, or better yet, that he has returned as one of the many voices that live in Brenda Lozano. A beautiful, painful, funny, and tender novel.” Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy
About the Author
Brenda Lozano is a fiction writer, essayist, and editor. Her books include:
Todo nada (All or Nothing, 2009), followed by
Cuaderno ideal (Loop, 2019), and a book of short stories
Cómo piensan las piedras (How Stones Think, 2017). In 2015 she was selected by Conaculta, the Hay Festival and the British Council as one of Mexico's best fiction writers under 40. In 2017 she was added to the Bogota 39 list, a selection of the best fiction writers under 40 from across Latin America.
Witches is her most recent novel.
Heather Cleary has translated poetry and prose by writers including Betina González, Mario Bellatin, Sergio Chejfec, and María Ospina; her work has been recognized by the National Book Foundation, the Best Translated Book Award, the National Translation Award, and others.