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The ear is the organ of fear. It is a door to that which is not of this world.
Leaving behind the dread and decay of the city, Noa and her best friend, Nicole, travel up into the Andes, headed for Solar Noise: an eight-day festival that takes place on the side of a volcano. It is a world of shamanism and underground music, a world in tune with the thunder of the earth and the bellows of the mountains.
Noa has been drawn there in search of her father, who abandoned her as a child, and who now lives somewhere near the festival site. But soon after their arrival, she begins speaking in a voice that is not her own. Believing Noa to be in danger, Nicole struggles to care for her friend. Until, as the party spills into Inti Raymi - the Incan festival of the sun - the girls' desire for belonging burns, incandescent, collapsing the thin membrane separating life from death, trauma from transcendence, and ecstasy from oblivion.
Wild and incantatory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun is both an hallucinogenic trip of a novel, and a heartfelt meditation on love, family and kinship - one that announces the arrival of a major writer.
About the author
Mónica Ojeda is the author of four novels, including
Jawbone, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Translation, as well as three collections of poetry and a collection of short stories. She was selected as one of
Granta's Best of Young Spanish-language novelists in 2021, and was included in the Bogotá39 list in 2017. Born in Ecuador, she is now based in Madrid, Spain.
Sarah Booker is a teacher and literary translator. Her translations include novels by Mónica Ojeda, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Gabriela Ponce. She has a PhD in Hispanic Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill and is currently based in Morganton, North Carolina where she teaches Spanish and Humanities at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.
