Book of the Month January 2025
Quizlit’s Book of the Month January 2025 is A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enríquez. Mixing the macabre with the reverberations of Argentina’s stormy past, this hypnotic short fiction collection finds Enriquez at the height of her powers
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Book of the Month January 2025
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enríquez
On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women.
Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.
Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”
Mariana Enriquez [is] one of the best modern practitioners of the form… It is Enriquez’s great gift that she can make stories with ugly subject matter so addictive and full of life… Unsettling – Observer
At her best, Enriquez has an unrivalled instinct for the subtly appalling image, a Lynchian (David, not Paul) sense of how horror inheres within the benign… Enriquez… is pretty much unbeatable – Guardian
This collection has raised the stakes for everybody in the [horror] genre to an entirely new level… enticing… deeply unsettling, darkly humorous and, like all good horror movies and books, you can’t look away – even for a second – NB magazine
Superb… A collection of enthralling and sinister stories from one of Latin America’s brightest stars – Telegraph
‘A Sunny Place for Shady People reveals as much about ourselves as it does our ineffably strange, horrific world… A collection of brilliant nightmares from one of our best’ – Paul Tremblay
Seductively gothic… [Enriquez] is at the height of her powers… at her fiercest, she sets down morbid manifestations of misogyny and female desire, rooted by a scythe-sharp, bone-dry humour… this might be her most untrammelled-and certainly her most unwavering-collection yet – Prospect magazine
Also by Mariana Enríquez
A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.
For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?
Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes.
If you enjoyed our Book of the Month January 2025, check out our 10 Best Books of 2024
