The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.
Torture, sexual assault, death, animal death.
From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.
But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?
A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.
Don't just take our word for it...
“Bazterrica’s absorbing feminist literary horror novel (previously available only in Spanish) stars an unnamed narrator who documents her deplorable situation in an illicit diary as a survivor living in a converted monastery… This satirical horror is incisive and convincing as it skewers religious fervor and blind obedience.”
– Booklist (starred) 🌟
“This heartrending postapocalyptic tale from Bazterrica (Tender Is the Flesh) examines religious devotion and the search for tenderness in a world torn apart by climate collapse. Moses’s translation is marvelous, capturing the lush lyricism with which Bazterrica describes the most harrowing extremes of human experience. Calling to mind Cormac McCarthy and Chelsea G. Summers, this is as beautiful as it is brutal.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Caustically original… an end-of-the-world scenario with a Handmaid’s Tale vibe… A somber reflection on an increasingly hostile world.”
– Kirkus
Taste the very first page
Someone is screaming in the dark. I hope it’s Lourdes.
I put cockroaches in her pillow and sewed up the slip, so they struggle to get out, so they crawl under her head or over her face (and into her ears, I hope, nesting there, the nymphs damaging her brain). I left small gaps between the stitches so the cockroaches would escape slowly, so it would take effort, like when I trap them (imprison them) in my hands. Some of them bite. They have flexible skeletons; they can flatten themselves and fit through tiny spaces, live without heads for days, survive underwater for a long time. They’re fascinating. I like to experiment with them. Cut off their antennae. Their legs. Stick needles in them. I squash them with a glass so I can linger over their primitive, brutal frames.
I boil them.
I burn them.
I kill them.
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