"I was astonished by how many huge ideas could fit into this taut, swift novella by Brenda Peynado: it's all at once a meditation on motherhood, grief, war, environmental collapse, dread, and the nature of memory and time; yet the book is miraculously also buoyant, thrilling, a breathless and headlong read for a breathtaking time on this planet. I ate it up."—Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author
"Time’s Agent is a gorgeous mediation on grief, colonialism, love and parenthood. Sharp and sparkling."—Lauren Beukes, bestselling author of The Shining Girls
"There are huge, fascinating ideas laced throughout this story of shattering grief... Fans of Carmen Maria Machado will find in this debut novelist a new author to follow every bit as voraciously."—Library Journal, starred review
Praise for The Rock Eaters
"Peynado is a writer willing to cross literary borders."—Julia Alvarez
"Peynado conjures both the playful sorcery of Kelly Link and the haunted atmosphere of Kali Fajardo-Anstine."—NPR
“A genre-bending sociopolitical commentary with prose that shines.”—The Washington Post
“Each of Peynado’s storis is finely formed as a diamond…Wily but throbbing with heart, they dart into unexpected crevices of human experience…They speak to our unkempt, scarred world, even as they reimagine it not just once, but repeatedly.”—The San Francisco Chronicle
“Brenda Peynado’s The Rock Eaters only came out in 2021, but listening to it, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s been around long enough to be a modern magical realist classic.”—Paste
“Genre-bending brilliance . . . Peynado’s harnessing of the diasporic imagination establishes her as a true magician of the marvelous real.”—The Boston Globe
★ 06/01/2024
DEBUT Raquel Petra thinks she has it all. She's young, idealistic, and financially secure; she has a happy marriage, a beautiful daughter, a found family in her coworkers, and a job that is doing good in the world. But that perfect life is shattered when Raquel makes one tiny mistake that takes 40 years to even begin to fix. Raquel spends these years in a fast-time pocket world, while the real world spins out of control. Alone and grieving the loss of everyone and everything she knew, she puts together a desperate plan, not to fix things but to escape her present nightmare into a brave new world of her very own. There are huge, fascinating ideas laced throughout this story of shattering grief. Steeped in Peynado's Dominican culture, the novel's setting and its seemingly sudden destruction point to the evils of colonialism while demonstrating that this has all happened before and will again. Meanwhile, Raquel's archeological research into her country's destroyed history proves that hope and solutions can be found in unexpected times and places. VERDICT Fans of Carmen Maria Machado will find in this debut novelist a new author to follow every bit as voraciously.—Marlene Harris
