Overview

The ear is the organ of fear. It is a door to that which is not of this world. Leaving behind the dread and decay of the city, Noa and her best friend, Nicole, travel up into the Andes, headed for Solar Noise: an eight-day festival that takes place in the infinite expanse of the páramo. Nestled on the side of a volcano, it is a world of mysticism, shamanism and underground music, a world in tune with the thunder of the earth and the bellows of the mountains, a world in which the belief systems of Ecuador's indigenous communities live on. Noa also harbours a secret motive for attending the festival: she's been drawn there in search of her father, who abandoned her as a child, and who now lives somewhere near the festival site. But soon after their arrival, she becomes prone to somnambulism and begins speaking in a voice that is not her own. Uncertain of whether Noa is in danger or is communing with something primal and eternal, Nicole struggles to care for her friend. Until, as the party spills into Inti Raymi - the Incan festival of the sun - the girls' desire for belonging burns, incandescent, collapsing the thin membrane separating life from death, trauma from transcendence, and ecstasy from oblivion. Wild and incantatory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun is both an hallucinogenic trip of a novel, and a heartfelt meditation on love, family and kinship - one that announces the arrival of a major writer.

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9781803512419

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Reviews

Mónica Ojeda is a shining black sun on the birth chart of contemporary terror -- Fernanda Melchor I read Mónica Ojeda with fear and fascination. As if I were reading a spell, as if I were eating meat fearing something sharp in it. So poetic, so disturbing and brutal -- Samanta Schweblin Ojeda invites you to an Andean retro-futuristic festival in the mountains. Psychedelia, volcanos, disintegration. And then the language burns and nothing is what it seems -- Mariana Enriquez Mónica Ojeda has at her disposal the most enviable combination I can imagine, and she has it in spades: a lucid mind, an exacting language, and a wild heart -- Andrés Barba

Author Information

Mónica Ojeda is the author of four novels, including Jawbone, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Translation, as well as three collections of poetry and a collection of short stories. She was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-language novelists in 2021, and was included in the Bogotá39 list in 2017. Born in Ecuador, she is now based in Madrid, Spain. Sarah Booker is a literary translator working from the Spanish. She has translated work by Mónica Ojeda, Gabriela Ponce and Cristina Rivera Garza, and her translations have been published in the Paris Review, Asymptote and 3:am magazine, among other publications.

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