Description

The ear is the organ of fear. It is a door to that which is not of this world.

Leaving behind the dread and decay of the city, Noa and her best friend, Nicole, travel up into the Andes, heading for Solar Noise: an eight-day festival that takes place on the side of a volcano, in the infinite expanse of the paramo. A world of mysticism and underground music, in tune with the thunder of the earth and the bellows of the mountains.

Noa has been drawn there in search of her father, who, wrestling with the violence of Ecuador, abandoned her as a child. But soon after their arrival at the festival, Noa appears possessed, speaking in a voice that is not her own. Believing Noa to be in danger, Nicole struggles to care for her friend. Until, as the party spills into Inti Raymi – the Incan festival of the sun – the girls’ desire for belonging burns, incandescent, collapsing the thin membrane separating life from death, and trauma from transcendence.

Wild and incantatory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun is both an hallucinogenic trip of a novel, and a heartfelt meditation on love, family and kinship – one that announces the arrival of a major writer.

Publisher Review

Monica Ojeda is a shining black sun on the birth chart of contemporary terror -- Fernanda Melchor I read Monica Ojeda with fear and fascination. As if I were reading a spell, as if I were eating meat fearing something sharp in it. So poetic, so disturbing and brutal -- Samanta Schweblin One of the best writers of her generation -- Agustina Bazterrica A reading experience as singular and sublime as staring into the eye of the volcano... I loved it -- Saba Sams Dizzying and bold, profound and very deeply moving - it's not often a writer poses such mighty questions, and then dares to answer them -- Lisa McInerney Ojeda invites you to an Andean retro-futuristic festival in the mountains. Psychedelia, volcanos, disintegration. And then the language burns and nothing is what it seems -- Mariana Enriquez A technicolour journey into loss and longing, a hyper-vivid collision of the human soul with sound, music and nature, this nigh-on hallucinogenic novel is a spectacular experience all of its own. Ojeda is a sorceress, and her dazzling prose is sheer alchemy -- Will Maclean Monica Ojeda has at her disposal the most enviable combination I can imagine, and she has it in spades: a lucid mind, an exacting language, and a wild heart -- Andres Barba Visceral and uncanny, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun fuses the ancestral forces of the Andes with the urgent demands of the present. Pulsing with the rhythms of festival music and the dread of a missing father, it is a story that never settles and never stops vibrating -- Carlos Fonseca