★ 05/27/2024

A woman contends with her fraught relationships as a plague devastates her country in this vivid outing from Uruguayan author Trias (The Rooftop). A noxious red wind originating from toxic red algae has caused a lethal epidemic in the unnamed narrator’s coastal city, killing hundreds, decimating the food supply, and forcing people to eat an unappetizing “pink slime” produced by a new meat-processing plant. The 40-something narrator regularly visits her self-destructive ex-husband, Max, who survived exposure to the wind, and her hypercritical mother, Leonor. She also nannies a wealthy boy named Mauro, whose tantrums and insatiable hunger require constant supervision. When a powerful windstorm hits the country—bringing with it road closures, power outages, and soot from a mysterious fire that the government keeps quiet about—the narrator and her loved ones’ chances of survival rapidly dwindle. The novel captivates with its increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere, and Trías keenly explores the resentments that fester within a mother-daughter relationship, a failing marriage, and childcare work. Readers will be gripped. (July)

"An intimate, melancholic look at an ecologically ravaged future."—Silvia Moreno-Garcia, New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic

"A knockout of a story."—Kirkus (starred review)

"Pink Slime is a dystopia all too near to us, in which human connections and sadness over the end matter more than any explanation of the fog and disease that shroud everything. Trías's writing, precise and poetic, turns this beautiful novel into a toxic dream, into a meditation on ruins, bodies, and solitude."—Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

"Like a faintly distorting mirror, Pink Slime reflects back to us the image of a dying world. In this country, abandoned by God and government, the only consolation is the compassion and silent heroism of a few human beings. With her meticulous prose and the painful lucidity characteristic of her work, Fernanda Trías immerses us in a dystopia that expands around us like a poisonous perfume."—Guadalupe Nettel, author of Still Born, short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize

"Like a nightmare, like an omen, like the lines of an exquisite poem, Pink Slime echoes in my memory long after I read it. A book has never been so relevant, necessary, painful, and simply splendid.”—Jazmina Barrera, author of Cross-Stitch

"Vivid... The novel captivates with its increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere, and Trías keenly explores the resentments that fester within a mother-daughter relationship, a failing marriage, and childcare work. Readers will be gripped."—Pubilsher's Weekly (starred review)

"An eerily calm tale...told in a conversational yet purposely discomfiting future subjunctive tense... With her eerie and unnervingly probable plot, strong narrative voice, and focus on the small, beautiful moments of life amid disaster, Trias’s tale will continue to haunt readers long after they turn the final page."—Library Journal (starred review)

“A beautiful elegiac meditation on parenting – in this case, the deep connection between a mother and son."—Locus Magazine

International praise for Pink Slime

“This is not a dystopia, but a full-on, technicolor apocalypse... That we are in the company of someone who truly cares makes the horror all the more visceral.”—The Scotsman

"Powerful and beautifully written, this is a disturbing read, depicting a terrifyingly convincing near-future scenario. The reader shares the achingly sad narrator’s feelings as care-giver, daughter and ex-lover." —The Guardian

"Trías expertly encapsulates the relationship between mother and child, obligation and affection, and the conflation of fear with love."—Kill Your Darlings Magazine

"Latin American fantastika is in the midst of a remarkable renaissance. The latest of this string of exhilarating new books to find its way into English is Uruguayan novelist Fernanda Trias's Pink Slime."—The Saturday Paper

"It's a dystopic work worthy of JG Ballard, where even in hopelessness there remains a flickering shard of hope or resignation."—The Irish Times

"Precise, luminous, and powerful."—L'indipendente

“Fernanda Trías revisits the apocalyptic novel with subtlety and intelligence; not as a heroic epic of survival, but through intense emotions and a choice that must be made.”—LH magazine

"[In this] novel—which belongs to that category of books that don't leave you once you’ve finished reading but rather force you to think of them, to keep returning to them—the stubbornness upon which we all depend in order to save ourselves, those we love, and our environment begins to emerge."—La Stampa

"After Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream and Mariana Enríquez's Our Share of Night, Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías completes a triptych of extraordinary works that have come to us in the last decade from the Rio de la Plata area. Three very different novels that nonetheless share the force with which they look straight into the abyss, maintaining the lucidity necessary to focus on each revealing detail."—L’Indice

“Intoxicating.”—Lire

“Pink Slime, like all truly great novels, etches itself indelibly onto the sensitive plate of one’s mind.”—Transfuge

★ 06/01/2024

"I cannot stop a future that has already arrived," says the unnamed narrator of Trías's eerily calm tale about an environmental apocalypse. Told in a conversational yet purposely discomfiting future subjunctive tense, the novel recounts the slow breakdown of society after deadly algae washed ashore, killed all the fish, and made other living creatures sick when the wind blew off the sea. Now the only safe food for humans is the ultra-processed "pink slime" of the title. The narrator visits her mother and her hospital-bound ex-husband, who is one of the few humans able to tolerate infection. She also cares for a young boy with a horrific medical syndrome, whose rich parents need a break from his insatiable hunger. A compelling tale with an unhurried pace that is striking for how it juxtaposes lyricism with banality. VERDICT With her eerie and unnervingly probable plot, strong narrative voice, and focus on the small, beautiful moments of life amid disaster, Trías's (The Rooftop) tale will continue to haunt readers long after they turn the final page. Pair it with other thoughtful and subtle horror stories such as Sealed by Naomi Booth or Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin.

★ 2024-05-17
A town is decimated by a horrifying epidemic in this dark novel.

The second novel by Uruguayan author Trías to be translated into English—following The Rooftop (2021)—begins with a suffocating sense of doom and doesn’t let up from there. The unnamed narrator, living in a port town in an unnamed country, describes the aftermath of a destructive algae bloom that’s choking the life out of the area: “Under each unbroken surface, mold cleaved silent through wood, rust bored into metal. Everything was rotting. We were, too.” She recounts the early moments of the epidemic, when a massive fish kill gave an indication that something was wrong; the divers dispatched to investigate the cause all lost their lives to the disease, which causes its victims’ skin to peel from their bodies. The townspeople who have chosen to remain are forced to endure power outages and food shortages, with many only able to eat a processed food called “Meatrite”—the “pink slime” of the title. The narrator has regular contact with only three people: her mother, with whom she is engaged in an “eternal skirmish”; Max, her ex-husband, hospitalized and suffering from a chronic case of the disease; and Mauro, the boy she babysits, who has a syndrome that causes him to always be hungry. The narrator knows the situation isn’t going to improve anytime soon, and Trías captures her resigned dread perfectly. This is a stunningly dark novel, but a beautiful one; Trías’ prose and Cleary’s translation perfectly capture what it feels like to live in an epidemic: “It’s hard for me to describe time in confinement, because if anything characterized those periods it was the sensation of existing in a kind of non-time. We lived in a constant state of anticipation, but we weren’t waiting for anything in particular.” This is a knockout of a story.

Stunning writing makes this a startlingly powerful novel.