The Volcano Daughters - Paperback

by Gina Mar a. Balibrera (Author)

A searingly original debut about two sisters and their flight from genocide--which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to San Francisco's Cannery Row--each haunted along the way by the ghosts of their murdered friends, who are not yet done telling their stories

"A gripping and spellbinding novel...An unforgettable debut."
--Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half

"Stunning: original, magical, brutal, beautiful. A sweeping yet intimate look at love, sisterhood, and resistance in the face of devastation." --Charmaine Wilkerson, author of Black Cake

El Salvador, 1923. Graciela, a young girl growing up on a volcano in a community of Indigenous women, is summoned to the capital, where she is claimed as an oracle for a rising dictator. There she meets Consuelo, the sister she has never known, who was stolen from their home before Graciela was born. The two spend years under the cruel El Gran Pendejo's regime, unwillingly helping his reign of terror, until genocide strikes the community from which they hail. Each believing the other to be dead, they escape, fleeing across the globe, reinventing themselves until fate ultimately brings them back together in the most unlikely of ways...

Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations.

Author Biography

GINA MARÍA BALIBRERA earned an MFA in Prose from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program. She's been awarded grants from Aspen Words, Tin House, the Rackham Institute, and the Periplus Collective, as well as a Tyson Award, the Aura Estrada Prize, and the Under the Volcano Sandra Cisneros Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review, Latino Book Review, Pleiades, The Wandering Song: An Anthology of the Central American Diaspora, and elsewhere. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI, with her family.