Atlas de Xochimilco
Jazmina Barrera

NOVEL | 2027 | 272 pages

From one of the most acclaimed writers of contemporary Mexico, winner of the Cercador Prize and finalist for the National Book Award 2025


Atlas of the Floating Gardens braids three family stories across three eras, all tethered to a single place: Xochimilco, the network of pre-Hispanic floating gardens—the chinampas—at the southern edge of Mexico City, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the last living remnants of the lake-city the Aztecs built.

In 1984, Luz Amparo, a geographer in her sixties, returns to Xochimilco to lead a university project mapping the chinampas—and, privately, to recover the abandoned plot that belonged to her grandparents, navigating bureaucracy and the wariness of the chinamperos who farm there. Four decades later, in 2025, her granddaughter Camila travels from Chile with her young son Emiliano to see her estranged father, Clemente, who has moved back to the family house after a heart-failure diagnosis. Camila tries to make peace with her father, to paint the landscape for an exhibition, and to absorb the end of her marriage, while Emiliano builds an imaginary world—"the Sun Island"—to metabolize his childhood fears, fed by the pre-Hispanic creation myths his grandfather tells him. Running alongside them is Martín, a young chinampero fighting to hold onto his land against real-estate developers while teaching local children the old ways of farming.

Xochimilco itself is the novel's central character—a watery, remembering territory where myth, ecological fragility, class, and the search for a home all converge. Barrera writes in a lyrical, fragmented style, alternating the intimate and the collective, and the result is an affective atlas: a map of nostalgia, resistance, and a stubborn, earned hope.

RIGHTS: spanish (world) ANAGRAMA | english (world) HOGARTH PRESS | italian LA NUOVA FRONTIERA

BY JAZMINA BARRERA:

La reina de espadas
NONFICTION, 2024
Punto de cruz
NOVEL, 2021
Los nombres de los animales
CHILDREN’S, 2021
Linea nigra
ESSAYS, 2020
Cuaderno de faros
ESSAYS, 2017
Cuerpo extraño
ESSAYS, 2013