Bury Your Dead
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 8 sept 2026
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- $169.00
-
- Pedido anticipado
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- $169.00
Descripción editorial
By the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Author of On Earth As It Is Beneath
Edgar Wilson has a gruesome job, one he is entirely unsentimental about—he cleans up roadkill in rural Brazil. But one day vultures are circling in the woods, and he can’t not go see what they’re gathering for. What transpires is a quest—a miserable day-long journey—for a couple of poor working men who only want to acknowledge that everybody (and in this case, every literal body) has the right to be treated as more than just scrap or trash. Dead animals, defrocked priests, corpses abandoned in the woods, and a criminal outfit trafficking in body parts—Bury Your Dead is an exhortation, a road trip, a story of friendship, and a hymn to the small ways we can shape the world. Ana Paula Maia’s alchemy with the grimmest of ingredients makes this her more hopeful, generous novel yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Death continues to chase Edgar Wilson, the protagonist of Maia's Of Cattle and Men, in this stark follow-up, which mixes Biblical themes with pulp fiction and spaghetti western motifs. For the past 20 years, Edgar has served on a roadkill removal crew in Brazil, picking up corpses and running the deafening crusher to process them into fertilizer. Death is constant, with sex workers slain in the woods and residents succumbing to illnesses caused by dust from the nearby limestone quarry. Edgar prides himself on keeping one step ahead of death, arriving at car accidents in the aftermath, while his friend and colleague Tomás, a former priest who was excommunicated 10 years earlier for having killed a man, is driven to repent. Through a farcical and grisly turn of events, they wind up with a pair of dead bodies in Tomás's car, on a mission to give them a proper burial. Before it's over, they find themselves in a three-way standoff at a junkyard. The set pieces are striking, but Maia is concerned less with plot than with interrogating piousness. Most illuminating are Edgar's grim assessments of his morbid world, where baptisms are performed in a river "concealing in its depths the horrors of the unburied dead." This one leaves a mark.
