Candelaria Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

A sweeping, mystical novel following three generations of women as they grapple with muddled pasts and predetermined futures, Candelaria is a story of love that eats us alive from the author of Dreaming of You, Melissa Lozada-Oliva.

Your granddaughters are lost, Candelaria. Bianca, the brainy archaeologist, had to forfeit her life’s work in Guatemala after her advisor seduced and deserted her. Paola, missing for over a decade, resurfaces in Boston as a brainwashed wellness cultist named Zoe. And Candy, the youngest, is a recovering addict who finds herself pregnant by a man she’s not even sure ever existed. None of this concerns you of course, until a cataclysmic earthquake hits Boston. Now you must traverse the crumbling city to reach the Watertown Mall Old Country Buffet—for a reason you still cannot disclose—battling strange entities and your own strange past to save your granddaughters and possibly the world.

Told with tongue-in-cheek humor and sharp cultural critique, Candelaria is an unsettling, raucous debut novel that unearths one troubled family’s legacy, feasting on diasporic identity politics and examining the limits of bodily autonomy and the dangers of wanting to belong at any cost.

FICTION

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662601804

PUB DATE: September 19, 2023

224pp

Price: $26 US / $35 CAN

PRAISE FOR Dreaming of You

“The novel is narrated in verse, a device that could feel gimmicky in less capable hands than Lozada-Oliva’s, but instead melds with the macabre-yet-gossipy subject matter to create an unforgettable portrait of a public figure who to many seemed larger than life.” —Emma Specter, Vogue

“A macabre love story that casts an inquisitive eye on Latinidad, womanhood, and celebrity worship.” —Keely Weiss, Harper’s Bazaar

“Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s surreal novel-in-verse is sure to delight and surprise readers . . . You may know and love Selena’s voice, but Lozada-Oliva’s is utterly new, original, and worth hearing, too.” —Elena Nicolaou, Oprah Daily

MELISSA LOZADA-OLIVA is the child of Guatemalan and Colombian immigrants and the author of Dreaming of You and peluda Her work has been featured in NPR, Vogue Harper’s Bazaar PAPER Armani Beauty, and more. She is a member of the band Meli and the Specs. She holds an MFA in poetry from NYU and lives in New York City.

“An enjoyably madcap journey through the wasteland of fame, popular culture, and feminine identity in a post-colonial world.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review