Embajada de México en Reino Unido

It started with a drowning.

Deep in the heart of Mexico City, in a privada where five houses cluster around a sun-drenched courtyard, lives Ana, a precocious twelve-year-old who spends her days buried in Agatha Christie novels to forget the mysterious death of her little sister years earlier. Over the summer she decides to plant a garden in the courtyard, and as she digs the ground and plants her seeds, her neighbors in turn delve into their past. As the ripple effects of grief, childlessness, illness and displacement saturate their stories, secrets seep out and questions emerge – Who was my wife? Why did my Mom leave? Can I turn back the clock? And how could a girl who knew how to swim drown?

Oneworld Publications, an indie publisher based in London published UMAMI by Laia Jufresa, a wonderful debut novel taking place in Mexico City, which follows the different families who live in the same apartment complex. Each family has been stricken by grief one way or another, and it’s a story about how different people deal with loss. In prose that is dazzlingly inventive, funny and tender, Jufresa immerses us in the troubled lives of her narrators, deftly unpicking their stories to offer a darkly comic portrait of contemporary Mexico, as whimsical as it is heart-wrenching.