Description

Winner of the Uruguayan National Literature Prize for Fiction, the Bartolome-Hidalgo Fiction Prize, and the Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Literature Prize.

A port city is in the grips of an ecological crisis. The river has filled with toxic algae, and a deadly ‘red wind’ blows through its streets; much of the coast has been evacuated as the wealthy migrate inland to safety, leaving the rest to shelter in abandoned houses as blackouts and food shortages abound.

The unnamed narrator is one of those who has stayed. She spends her days trying to disentangle herself from the two relationships that had once meant everything to her, and looking after the young boy who’s been placed in her care. As the world in which they move becomes smaller, she reflects on the collapse of the other emotional ties in her life and the emergence of a radical yet tender solitude.

With striking prose and vivid characters, the multi-award-winning Pink Slime offers profound reflections on motherhood, marriage, and caregiving, set against the backdrop of a crumbling city.

Publisher Review

'This distressing and emotional science-fiction novel that tells the story of how an inexplicable plague destroys a city ... The collapse of the food supply, bodies, feelings, and the system is narrated with a heartbreaking beauty.' -- Jordi Carrion * The New York Times * '[T]his ominous novel predicts a universe similar to the one that began with the pandemic, one charged with contradictory uncertainties, and it acts like a potential environment where the author can take her obsessions to the extreme and once again consolidate the oppressive and suffocating form that stands out in all of her work.' -- Leonor Courtoisie * Latin American Literature Today * 'She breaks through parameters, shatters expectations, breaks down internal walls like that invading algae that changes the lives of the residents in the town. Almost like Rulfo in Comala. A poetic and tenacious whirlwind, dreadful and sublime ... An extraordinary work!' -- Aura Lucia Mera * El Pais * 'Pink Slime is a powerful novel - short phrases, unusual poetic twists, the attachment to human ties as a reason to overcome chaos, the insistence of love over heartbreak despite everything. An extraordinary dystopian novel. Highly recommended.' -- Gioconda Belli, author of The Country Under My Skin 'Halfway between a classic dystopia like 1984 or Farenheit 451 and one of the great catastrophe novels by J.G. Ballard like The Drowned World or The Drought ... Always intense and evocative, and with a subtle construction of layers and mechanisms, this new novel by Fernanda Trias transcends genres and installs itself in a unique territory, at the border of horror without fully sinking into that abyss ... Trias's prose, precise and elegant, is able to bravely look into the abyss with tenderness in the same breath, to return to the central themes of what it means to be human in our culture, and, at the same time, to participate in the contemporary debate about the place that this humanity occupies in a world of crisis. Fernanda Trias has created a mirror where we can see these strange times we are having to live through, and has given her faithful readers the best out of all her novels.' -- Ramiro Sanchiz, literary critic, translator, and author of Trashpunk '[A]n extremely powerful metaphor of an emotional world in crisis where everything is about to collapse, held together by the weak threads of memory, tenderness, solidarity, and the effort to make it to a place where life is different. The language is charged with poetic breath but never loses its tie to the concrete, wisely leaning on the details. Reading this novel is both stimulating and disturbing, and after closing it, its images will continue chasing us for a long time, charged with beauty and melancholy. Truly extraordinary.' -- Piedad Bonnett, poet, dramaturg, novelist, and memoirist 'Trias's gaze ... -her quiet and disquieting writing, poetic and precise - creates cracks and escapes all over the place: in the hearts of her creatures, in their relationships, in the damaged world.' -- Giuseppe Caputo, author of An Orphan World 'No one writes like Fernanda Trias. Reading her is like watching a revelation or an undressing. That revelation starts gradually and irresistibly, phrase by phrase, until you realise that you are the one being undressed.' -- Daniel Mella, author of Older Brother Praise for The Rooftop: 'At its core, it's a story about being trapped and the fear, isolation, and anxiety that emerge when one is stuck in a dark, dark place. A tiny, shocking book about despair and its haunting consequences.' * Kirkus Reviews * Praise for The Rooftop: 'Trias deftly turns her brief fiction into universal parable.' * Shelf Awareness * Praise for The Rooftop: 'A chilling tour-de-force by one of the most exciting and subversive voices writing today in Latin America.' * Morning Star *