Slash and Burn

Claudia Hernández author Julia Sanches translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:And Other Stories

Published:5th Jan '21

Should be back in stock very soon

Slash and Burn cover

Shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize

Shortlisted for the Premio Valle-Inclan prize
for its translation

Through war and its aftermaths, a woman fights to keep her daughters safe. Like peasants through the ages, she desperately slashes and burns in order to make a place for her children to return to.

A country girl sees her village sacked and her beloved father disappeared. She is taken to the mountains to join the guerrillas, who force her to give up the baby she conceives. Surviving the rebellion, and now a woman, she sets out to find her daughter, travelling across the Atlantic with meagre resources. She returns to a community in which civilians, the militia and the ex-guerrilla fighters have to live together in a society riddled with distrust, fear and hypocrisy.

Hernandez’ narrators have the level gaze of ordinary women reckoning with extraordinary hardship. Denouncing the ruthless machismo of combat with quiet intelligence, Slash and Burn creates a suspenseful, slow-burning revelation of rural life in the aftermath of political trauma.

‘This is a book that uses indirect narration to create accounts that are both detailed and expansive, putting the personal first but speaking for the collective and from a more vulnerable part of society, really demonstrating the multi-layered meaning of being a survivor.’ Sounds and Colours

* Sounds and Colours *

Slash and Burn investigates with brilliance and compassion the depth of desolation, violence and loss the civil conflict inflicted on a scarred society.’ Morning Star

* Morning Star *

‘A brilliant evocation of civil war and its bitter legacy.’

Lucy Popescu, The Observer

* The Observer *

'An intensive reading experience . . . What Slash and Burn – named after a method of agriculture both destructive and regenerative – shows is the difficulty of creating a new life after war or other trauma.​​' John Self, The Guardian

* The Guardi

ISBN: 9781911508823

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 350g

320 pages