Algo nuestro sobre la tierra
Joseph Zárate

NON-FICTION | 2021 | 109 pages

SPECIAL MENTION: 2022 NATIONAL LITERATURE PRIZE IN PERU

"Now, this barren land will be filled with the victims of an unusual war, a war without weapons or slogans."

When Perú was reaching the highest Covid-19 mortality rate in the world, Joseph Zárate accompanied a group of men and women in charge of the difficult funeral work for victims of the pandemic.

Alongside these people on the last line of resistance against the onslaught of the virus, the author visited houses, streets, hospitals, funerary agencies, crematoriums, and cemeteries around Lima in order to show the harrowing experiences lived by those who made the dead ones' final journeys possible while living through a time of fear, loss, and uncertainty. Algo nuestro sobre la tierra collects these testimonies and brings them together into a community chant of loss and despair. A chorus that emerges from the depths of a country ravaged by the plague and the abandonment of its institutions. These pages remind us of our fragile tether to life and of the desire that "when those of us who are still alive look back, we’ll meditate on what we should do today," in the words of the author.

RIGHTS: spanish (world) PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE