Flame Trees in May

By Karla Marrufo Translated by Allison A. DeFreese ISBN: 9781628974645 Publication Date: 5/2/2023 In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable specificity: loneliness, family angst, memory loss—from a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucatán Peninsula. Mayo’s unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucatán culture and community that Marrufo describes through her narrator’s fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers. Praise for Mayo “There are stories that cannot help but change us forever, and Mayo, with its showers of golden rain, its flame trees on fire, its dark sun and the drips and drops that form bubbles, is one of them.”—Nidia Cuan Biographical Information Karla Marrufo Huchim holds a Doctorate in Hispanic-American Literature