Malacría
Elisa Díaz Castelo
NOVEL | 2025 | 266 pages
How do the pasts that live inside us—including those that we have no knowledge of—affect the present? Malacría, Elisa Díaz Castelo’s marvelous debut novel, explores these territories through the intergenerational history of three women and the thread of violence that moves through them.
One morning, after feeding the dogs, Ele’s mother leaves her house and doesn’t come back. Hours later, a young Eli and Jeni, her mother’s partner, set off on a search with Valeriana, an endearing dog who becomes a protagonist of the story. As they follow the clues that the missing woman has left behind, like pieces of an incomplete puzzle, the family’s multiple pasts appear and reappear, scattered through brief textual fragments. Through these windows into reality and the protagonists’ inner worlds, Malacría also acts as a small fresco of the feminine experience in 20th and early 21st-century Mexican society.
Much like classical tragedies, this intergenerational story poses a question: isn’t the thing that seems to protects us from reliving trauma precisely what ends up putting it directly in it?
RIGHTS: spanish SEXTO PISO
“With precise prose that is full of discoveries, Elisa Díaz Castelo unravels the story of three generations of women: a lineage of absences, houses in ruins, and inhabitable secrets. Malacría is the first novel by writer with multiple talents with a keen eye toward the way poems are forged and an intelligence that wanders from erudition to mystery.”
“To enter this novel is to fall under the spell of Elisa Díaz Castelo’s prose and poetry. I’m captivated by this lineage of solitary women who get lost and find each other in parallel universes. They’ll stay with me forever.”
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