It started with a drowning.
Deep in the heart of Mexico City, where five houses cluster around a sundrenched courtyard, lives Ana, a precocious twelve-year-old who spends her days buried in Agatha Christie novels to forget the mysterious death of her little sister years earlier. Over the summer she decides to plant a garden in the courtyard, and as she digs the ground and plants her seeds, her neighbors in turn delve into their past. As the ripple effects of grief, childlessness, illness and displacement saturate their stories, secrets seep out and questions emerge – Who was my wife? Why did my Mom leave? Can I turn back the clock? And how could a girl who knew how to swim drown?
In prose that is dazzlingly inventive, funny and tender, Jufresa immerses us in the troubled lives of her narrators, deftly unpicking their stories to offer a darkly comic portrait of contemporary Mexico, as whimsical as it is heartwrenching.

Laia Jufresa became the first ever International Writer in Residence at Hay Festival in 2015, the same year she was named one of Mexico’s most outstanding young writers by Mexico20. Umami is her first novel. She lives in Cologne, Germany.
Sophie Hughes is a literary translator and editor living in Mexico City.