Bury Your Dead - Pre-Order

Synopsis

Edgar Wilson has traded his brutal work in a slaughterhouse for a new job collecting roadkill from the highways of rural Brazil. Day after day, he gathers the bodies of animals struck by passing vehicles, transporting them to be ground into fertilizer. It is grim, methodical work, until a circling flock of vultures leads him to something he was never meant to find: the body of a woman hanging in the forest.

As Edgar attempts to alert the authorities, he discovers a world in which institutions have quietly abandoned their responsibilities and ordinary people are left to confront the unthinkable alone. Blurring the line between human and animal, sacred and profane, Bury Your Dead is a stark, haunting novel about labour, dignity, violence, and the moral weight of caring for the forgotten. With her spare, hypnotic prose, Ana Paula Maia transforms the darkest corners of contemporary Brazil into a powerful meditation on mortality and compassion.

About the Author

Ana Paula Maia is an award-winning Brazilian novelist and screenwriter whose fiction explores labour, violence, decay, and survival with striking economy and emotional force. Her novels Of Cattle and Men and On Earth As It Is Beneath earned international acclaim, with the latter shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Bury Your Dead is translated from the Portuguese by Canadian-American novelist and translator Padma Viswanathan.

Publisher

Charco Press

Publication Date

August 11, 2026

Format

Paperback

Pages

128

Subjects

Literary Fiction · Fiction in Translation · Brazilian Literature · Noir · Psychological Fiction · Novella

ISBN

9781917260343