Pink Slime

Winner of the Uruguayan National Literature Prize for Fiction, the Bartolome-Hidalgo Fiction Prize, and the Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Literature Prize.

A port city is in the grips of an ecological crisis. The river has filled with toxic algae, and a deadly 'red wind' blows through the city, forcing everyone indoors at the sound of a siren. Those exposed to the wind fall ill; much of the coast has been evacuated, with rich people migrating inland to escape the wind, while others remain behind, sheltering in abandoned houses as blackouts and food shortages abound, and a black-market economy reigns.

The unnamed narrator is one of those who has stayed, looking after a boy who's been placed in her care. As the city outside continues to break down, she reflects on the collapse of her emotional ties, the uncertainty of this new world, and the emergence of a radical solitude.

With striking prose and vivid characters, Pink Slime offers profound reflections on motherhood, marriage, and caregiving, set against the backdrop of a climate-ravaged, deteriorating city.


'This distressing and emotional science-fiction novel that tells the story of how an inexplicable plague destroys a city ... The collapse of the food supply, bodies, feelings, and the system is narrated with a heartbreaking beauty.'
-Jordi Carri n, The New York Times

' T his ominous novel predicts a universe similar to the one that began with the pandemic, one charged with contradictory uncertainties, and it acts like a potential environment where the author can take her obsessions to the extreme and once again consolidate the oppressive and suffocating form that stands out in all of her work.'
-Leonor Courtoisie, Latin American Literature Today

'She breaks through parameters, shatters expectations, breaks down internal walls like that invading algae that changes the lives of the residents in the town. Almost like Rulfo in Comala. A poetic and tenacious whirlwind, dreadful and sublime ... An extraordinary work!'
-Aura Lucia Mera, El Pais