The Summer of the Serpent

<b>This surreal, horror-tinged, Guadalajara-set work of Latin American “literature of the unusual” is a kaleidoscopic descent into the small violences and hidden horrors of one sweltering summer, forming a coil of vignettes that slither under the skin for a strange, deeply human portrait of memory, myth, and family.<br><br>For fans of Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and Brenda Lozano.</b><br><br>Guadalajara, Mexico, 1977. In a quiet residential neighborhood, children witness things they can never forget: a serpent girl weeping in a carnival glass box, a neighbor who dangles his dog from a tree, and a ghost who returns night after night, desperate to tell its story. Meanwhile, the grown-ups drift through the season half oblivious, their spirits eroding as the relentless summer wears on.<br><br>Told in colliding voices—children and adults, ghosts and the haunted, the living and the almost-invisible—<i>The Summer of the Serpent</i> is a prismatic portrait of the past, where memory is shot through with myth. Each narrator offers a fragment of the truth, until the stories twist together into a shape as elusive and mesmerizing as the boa constrictor that winds its way through the neighborhood.<br><br>Strange yet deeply human, this brilliantly fragmented novel captures the moment when childhood innocence begins to corrode—and how those memories can coil through a lifetime.