From the jacket:
Nítido Amán knows he was born in Guatemala, but he doesn’t know where, or why his family left. Raised in the United States by his immigrant parents, he never asked them about his homeland as a child—and they never talked about it. When Nítido loses his father to Alzheimer’s disease, his despondent mother, the sole bearer of a past long kept secret from her son, grows increasingly silent. Nítido realizes that his only links to the past are disappearing. So he travels to Guatemala, against his mother’s wishes, to see what he can uncover for himself.
He arrives in the small town of Río Roto, prepared only to ask some questions. But when he is mistaken for the new local priest, Nítido decides to play the part. The confessional confidences of the townspeople prove more fruitful than ordinary conversation in leading him to the answers he seeks. Answering his parishioners’ whispered summons, Nítido catches tantalizing and frightening glimpses of the history he’s aching to know.
But Río Roto is a place shrouded in silence and secrets, where every unspoken word bears weight, a place that can neither escape nor give voice to the unnamed horrors it has seen. Nítido is at once determined and frightened to unearth these horrors, even as they force him to reevaluate his own haunted past.
In elegant, hypnotic prose, Sylvia Sellers-García delivers a story of divergent cultures and divided identities, of conflicts between generations and civilizations, of mourning, and, finally, of healing. When The Ground Turns in Its Sleep marks her arrival as a distinctive and powerful new voice in fiction.
“Sylvia Sellers-García has invented a rich and strange place, and her novel is possessed of a narrative voice that brings to mind the atmosphere and tension of Gabriel García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel. When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep is an extraordinarily assured novel. It’s a mesmerizing debut.”
—Katharine Weber, author of Triangle and The Little Women
“Mysteries unfold across time and space in this spell-binding journey into Latin America’s tragic past and unsettled present. With grace and verve, Sylvia Sellers-García dissects the baroque heart of a rural village and finds the emotional tissue that binds it to one man’s soul.”
—Héctor Tobar, author of The Tattooed Soldier and Translation Nation
“Sylvia Sellers-García writes a marvelous prose: spare, cinematic, utterly compelling. The story - the slow revelation of meaning out of unspoken knowledge and hoarded memories in a Guatemalan village -unfolds with ceremonious dignity. But it is this young novelist's superb control of pace which astonishes.”
—Inga Clendinnen, author of Reading the Holocaust and Dancing with Strangers
“I reached Río Roto as the sun was setting. From the decline that followed the bridge to Murcia I saw a thing that made me stop in the road. I thought for a confused moment that the town was a lake whose mirroring surface reflected the constellations. The small lights wavered and disappeared and returned as if touched by ripples of water. But they could not be stars, because they moved – slowly, almost imperceptibly – towards the southwest corner of town, where they already formed a flickering, roving cluster. I walked on, perplexed, and only when I reached the entrance to the cemetery and saw the people filing in, holding their candles aloft, did I remember that it was the first of November, the day of the dead. For some minutes I stood beyond the reach of the candlelight, watching the slow procession and the lights gathering and vanishing among the tombs. Then I turned east to avoid them.”
