The Book of Denial

From award-winning Mexican author Ricardo Chávez Castañeda and the visionary Mexican designer Alejandro Magallanes comes a horror story and ghost story that is both daringly and beautifully told in word and image.

There are stories so terrible that we tremble to hear even a whisper of them. Even more terrible, some of them are true. This is one such story, a story of our deepest inhumanity—one that confronts the history of violence against children, and through its young narrator, attempts to find a way out.

A horror story and ghost story told as much through art as through text, The Book of Denial is an antidote to our collective silence. By uplifting storytelling as a means of understanding the past and shaping the future, it is also—improbably—a beacon of hope.

Written by genre-defying Mexican author Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, The Book of Denial is a dark and powerful story within a story, illustrated with a striking graphic sensibility by Alejandro Magallanes and translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel.

This is the third book to appear under Unruly, an imprint of picture books for older readers, and includes a short note to readers about how it continues to build this experimental framework of visually complex, sophisticated picture books for teens and adults.

• A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the 21st Century (So Far)
• A Kirkus Reviews Best YA Book of 2024
• A 2025 Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book of the Year, Outstanding Merit
• Selected for the USBBY Outstanding International Book List, 2025
• Selected for the 2025 Crawford Award Honour List
• A 2025 Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated Young Adult Book Prize Honor Book