Umami

Deep in mourning, twelve-year-old Ana and her neighbours would like nothing more than to turn time around.There's Ana's best friend's mum, who fled, leaving behind a letter her dad refuses to share. There's Ana's own mother, in shock since her youngest daughter entered a lake and failed to return. There's the painter, a manic depressive and compulsive liar, who neither eats nor paints but invents colours with words. And there's the landlord, a widower and food anthropologist Ana greatly admires, who tries to communicate with his dead wife through a black box of his own devising.While Ana stirs the soil and spreads the seeds in the courtyard's garden, her eccentric neighbours rummage in their pasts – their lives bound together by family and culture. Darkly comic and dizzyingly inventive, Jufresa deftly weaves together a unique vision of contemporary Mexico which is as entertaining as it is compelling and heart-wrenching.