Mar de piedra
Aura García-Junco

FICTION | 2022 | 272 pages

Mexico City, 2025. Madero, which was previously one of the most-transited avenues in the city, is now occupied by the statues of the hundreds of women, men, and children who disappear day after day. This unusual phenomenon coincides with the propagation of the mattangs—maps that, according to believers, reveal the destinies of those who know how to read them—and whose cult has taken over the capital. When the skeptical teacher Sofía finds in one of these the trace of a ghost from the past, who is now a stone being, the currents of the cosmos will lead her to the possible origin of their disappearance.

In this dystopian, gray city, a university professor, a recovering alcoholic, and a furious young woman who denies the past navigate a society that has grown used to seeing its members disappear, but that also has people who refuse to forget.

In Mar de piedra, Aura García-Junco—one of the best Spanish-language narrators of her generation according to Granta—manages to write an impactful metaphor of a world petrified by selfishness and violence, and show how life and love can bloom between stone and asphalt.

RIGHTS: spanish SEIX BARRAL | english (uk & ireland) MTO PRESS

“Mar de piedra is a stony and cosmic journey, a novel about memory and erosion, and also about what remains.”
— Mónica Ojeda
“Aura García-Junco is one of the writers clearly pushing form in her allusive, fragmentary story of correspondences.”
— Valerie Miles, The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists
“Aura García-Junco has built a world that becomes more familiar the more it seeks the anomalies and discord coming from the noise of the crowd.”
— Roberto Pliego, Milenio