Bury Your Dead

 

Charlotte says about Bury Your Dead:
"Following two road-kill removers who find the body of a dead woman in a melancholic and rural corner of Brazil, Ana Paula Maia has written a masterpiece of contrasts; brutal but gently tender, miserable but incredibly hopeful, direct yet poetic - and I devoured every second of it. There’s no shying away from its physicality, and some of Maia’s descriptions are incredibly visceral, but alongside this is a tender handling of how we treat our dead and the lengths we go for justice."

Edgar Wilson has a gruesome job, one he is entirely unsentimental about—he cleans up roadkill in rural Brazil. But one day vultures are circling in the woods, and he can’t not go see what they’re gathering for. What transpires is a quest—a miserable day-long journey—for a couple of poor working men who only want to acknowledge that everybody (and in this case, every literal body) has the right to be treated as more than just scrap or trash. Dead animals, defrocked priests, corpses abandoned in the woods, and a criminal outfit trafficking in body parts—Bury Your Dead is an exhortation, a road trip, a story of friendship, and a hymn to the small ways we can shape the world. Ana Paula Maia’s alchemy with the grimmest of ingredients makes this her more hopeful, generous novel yet.

Author: Maia, Ana Paula

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 11 August 2026 by Charco Press in the United Kingdom.

Paperback / softback | 128 pages, Not illustrated
131 x 198 x 12 | 148g