Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun

Translated by Sarah Booker

The ear is the organ of fear. It is a door to that which is not of this world.

Leaving behind the dread and decay of the city, Noa and her best friend, Nicole, travel up into the Andes, heading for Solar Noise: an eight-day festival that takes place on the side of a volcano, in the infinite expanse of the páramo. A world of mysticism and underground music, in tune with the thunder of the earth and the bellows of the mountains.

Noa has been drawn there in search of her father, who, wrestling with the violence of Ecuador, abandoned her as a child. But soon after their arrival at the festival, Noa appears possessed, speaking in a voice that is not her own. Believing Noa to be in danger, Nicole struggles to care for her friend. Until, as the party spills into Inti Raymi – the Incan festival of the sun – the girls’ desire for belonging burns, incandescent, collapsing the thin membrane separating life from death, and trauma from transcendence.

Wild and incantatory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun is both an hallucinogenic trip of a novel, and a heartfelt meditation on love, family and kinship – one that announces the arrival of a major writer.

Mónica Ojeda is the author of four novels, including Jawbone, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Translation, as well as three collections of poetry and a collection of short stories. She was selected as one of Granta‘s Best of Young Spanish-language novelists in 2021, and was included in the Bogotá39 list in 2017. Born in Ecuador, she is now based in Madrid, Spain.

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Praise:

"Mónica Ojeda is a shining black sun on the birth chart of contemporary terror" - Fernanda Melchor

"I read Mónica Ojeda with fear and fascination. As if I were reading a spell, as if I were eating meat fearing something sharp in it. So poetic, so disturbing and brutal" - Samanta Schweblin

"One of the best writers of her generation" - Agustina Bazterrica