“With her first translated novel, Eudave presents us with Mexico in the 70s, profane and wicked yet timely and quite relevant for today.”
Guadalajara, Mexico. It’s 1977, and in a certain residential neighborhood, the kids see things they’ll never forget:
A dog dangling from a neighbor’s tree …
A ghost who comes back night after night just to tell its story …
A strange serpent girl, weeping in a glass box.
And the adults drift through the summer oblivious. All is quiet to them as their spirits erode in the relentless heat.
Colliding voices—young and old, living and the dead, ghosts and the haunted, every memory shot through with myth.
Why we’re excited about this book:
While her day job is spent as a professor and researcher at the University of Guadalajara, Cecilia Eudave spins haunting tales that leave her readers captivated. The author of the novels La criatura del espejo, El enigma de la esfera, Pesadillas al mediodía, Eudave has published over ten story collections and her fiction has been featured in the Japanese science-fiction magazine Lunatic 23. With her first translated novel, Eudave presents us with Mexico in the 70s, profane and wicked yet timely and quite relevant for today. Hannah Lillith Assadi (Paradiso 17) says The Summer of the Serpent is “A gorgeous, strange, kaleidoscopic book of wonders. This spare novel is a feat of magic, and its author is a true visionary.”, and Booklist says: “Eudave’s brief novel is intense, tightly layered, and unsettling as it slithers through familiar Latin American literary tropes, shedding its skin like a serpent to give them fresh life … Here, traditional logic is unreliable, death is an obsession, and the line between reality and the fantastic is porous.”
Releasing from Soho Press 30 June 2026, The Summer of the Serpent by Cecilia Eudave (translated by Robin Myers) is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA
