‘Stunning… An energetic and harrowing new voice.’ Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows

A young man jumps five floors to his death. His sister tries to understand why. A searing novel about abandonment, belonging and migration, from an exciting new Latin American voice.

Five floors, six seconds, a body crashing to the ground. When our narrator’s younger brother, Diego, takes his own life, she retreats into memories of the past, asking herself again and again: why? Revisiting their early years in Mexico, their childhood in Spain and the fragmentation and displacement that coloured their adult years, she pieces together a story of alienation and loss, but also of belonging, courage and hope.

Now, she has to return to Mexico with Diego’s ashes in hand. She finds a country that looks very different from the one she left behind and asks what it means to return to a home that never felt like one.

Eating Ashes is a tender, deeply poignant novel, shot through with flashes of dark humour, from a powerful new Latin American voice.