Umami

Deep in mourning, twelve-year-old Ana and her neighbors would like nothing more than to turn time around.

There’s Ana’s best friend’s mum, who fled, leaving behind a letter her dad refuses to share. There’s Ana’s own mother, in shock since her youngest daughter entered a lake and failed to return. There’s the painter, a manic depressive and compulsive liar, who neither eats nor paints but invents colors with words. And there’s the landlord, a widower and food anthropologist Ana greatly admires, who tries to communicate with his dead wife through a black box of his own devising.

While Ana stirs the soil and spreads the seeds in the courtyard’s garden, her eccentric neighbors rummage in their pasts their lives bound together by family and culture. Darkly comic and dizzyingly inventive, Jufresa deftly weaves together a unique vision of contemporary Mexico which is as entertaining as it is compelling and heart-wrenching.

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 Mexico20.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.