The Volcano Daughters
by Gina María Balibrera
Pantheon (US), Oneworld (UK), Planeta México (Latin America & Spain)
Release Date: August 20, 2024
- A Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch
- Featured as a Debut Author in Poets & Writers First Fiction 2024
- Chosen as a most anticipated book of 2024 by Vulture, The Seattle Times, Electric Literature, The Bibliophile, and more!
A saucy, searingly original debut about two sisters raised in the shadow of El Salvador's brutal dictator, El Gran Pendejo, and their flight from genocide, which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to cannery row, each followed by a chorus of furies, the ghosts of their murdered friends, who aren't yet done telling their stories.
El Salvador, 1923. Graciela grows up on a volcano in a community of indigenous women indentured to coffee plantations owned by the country's wealthiest, until a messenger from the Capital comes to claim her: at nine years old she's been chosen to be an oracle for a rising dictator—a sinister, violent man wedded to the occult. She'll help foresee the future of the country.
In the Capital she meets Consuelo, the sister she's never known, stolen away from their home before Graciela was born. The two are a small fortress within the dictator's regime, but they're no match for El Gran Pendejo's cruelty. Years pass and terror rises as the economy flatlines, and Graciela comes to understand the horrific vision that she's unwittingly helped shape just as genocide strikes the community that raised her. She and Consuelo barely escape, each believing the other to be dead. They run, crossing the globe, reinventing their lives, and ultimately reconnecting at the least likely moment.
Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts, through the stories of these sisters and the ghosts they carry with them, a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations.
Selected Praise for The Volcano Daughters
A gripping and spellbinding novel about a sisterhood ripped apart by violence, narrated by a ghostly chorus. An unforgettable debut.
Stunning: original, magical, brutal, beautiful. A sweeping yet intimate look at love, sisterhood, and resistance in the face of devastation.
A haunting (and haunted) debut, The Volcano Daughters is a dark marvel of a book, at once lush and stark, mythic and earthy. Balibrera's fusion of history and legend, puts me in mind of a young Isabel Allende.
My mind and heart were blown open by Gina Maria Balibrera's astonishing debut. The Volcano Daughters is a work of fierce ambition and blazing emotion, narrated by an unforgettable chorus of ghosts who trace the story of their friends, sisters Graciela and Consuelo, through a journey that spans continents and generations. As the chorus says: 'The word makes the world,' and with this novel, her first, Balibrera has done nothing less. Her invocation of the voices of a group of women whose lives were distorted and cut short by El Salvador's violent dictator El Gran Pendejo left me breathless—and is one of the most powerful stories of motherhood, sisterhood, and survival I've ever read. A colossal achievement.
This novel is astonishing: layered, lush, lyrical, and marvelously transporting. Gina María Balibrera has woven a gorgeous and painful tapestry, rich with history, memory, and the troubling voices of the dead who will not be silenced. The Volcano Daughters is a dazzling accomplishment.
Gina María Balibrera is a tremendous new talent. The Volcano Daughters is a towering achievement at the intersection of ancient myth, political history, and vibrant storytelling. A fierce and pulsating novel, this book will capture your heart and enrich your mind.
Every character comes vibrantly to life in The Volcano Daughters. Every scene surprises with unexpected tremors of questions about the legacy of political violence, how social upheaval shapes sibling dynamics and haunts the psyches of children for the rest of their lives. Gina María Balibrera is a writer of tremendous imagination who draws on her knowledge of two languages to craft a first novel unlike any other I've read.
The Volcano Daughters is a beautiful novel, weaving together magic and humour with tragedy and the unflinching documentary of injustice in a way that is so skillful and surprising.
Epic and intimate, alive and mournful, The Volcano Daughters is an exquisite novel teeming with life, ghosts, pain, and hope. I was swept away by its lyrical, generous storytelling. What a gorgeous, moving work.
The resilience of sisterly bonds forms the backbone of this swirling, heart-wrenching debut.
A devastating story of sisterhood, community, and memory, quietly magical and utterly unforgettable.
A bilingual, mythological, and original debut about resistance and survival.
A new heir to the magical-realism throne.
With keen psychological insight, Balibrera portrays how the women, each of whom doesn't know the other has survived, make hard choices in search of fulfillment. It adds up to a powerful story of finding the strength to chart one's own course.
A saucy, searingly original debut about two sisters raised in the shadow of El Salvador's brutal dictator, El Gran Pendejo, and their flight from genocide, which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to cannery row, each followed by a chorus of furies, the ghosts of their murdered friends, who aren't yet done telling their stories.
Balibrera debuts with a novel spanning the 1920s–40s that follows two sisters who live in El Salvador under the rule of a brutal dictator and flee the genocide of the country's Indigenous people. They are followed by the ghosts of their murdered friends as they travel the globe from Hollywood to Paris and reinvent their lives.
This intriguing debut novel from writer Gina María Balibrera introduces two sisters from El Salvador with a story unlike any other. Fleeing the cruelties of an occult-obsessed dictator, the sisters make their way around the world—Hollywood, Paris, Cannery Row—each separately haunted by their murdered friends and family. Is it historical fiction? Magical realism? Alternate history? Speculative mythology? The answer is yes.
Balibrera offers a new book to be entered into the historical magical realism canon. It is a staggering tome of sisterhood, disaster, and myth...an imaginative roller coaster of emotion.