When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep

The award-winning debut novel that ?brings to mind the atmosphere and tension of Gabriel García Márquez.?( Katharine Weber, author of The Little Women)

Nítido Amán knows he was born in Guatemala, but he doesn?t know why his family left. Raised in the States by his immigrant parents, they never talked about it. When Nítido loses his father to Alzheimer?s disease, his despondent mother grows increasingly silent and Nítido realizes that his links to the past are disappearing.

Seeking answers, Nítido travels to Guatemala against his mother?s wishes. Upon his arrival in the small town of Río Roto, he is mistaken for the new priest, and decides to play the part. From his parishioners, he catches tantalizing and frightening glimpses of the buried history he?s aching to know. In a place shrouded in secrets, Nítido is at once determined and frightened to unearth the unnamed horrors it has seen.

With her elegant, hypnotic prose, this marks Sellers- García?s arrival as a distinctive new voice in fiction.Sylvia Sellers-García was born in Boston and grew up in the United States and Central America. A graduate of Brown University and a Marshall scholar at Oxford, she has interned at Harper’s and worked at The New Yorker; her fiction has been published in StoryQuarterly. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History at the University of California, Berkeley.