It started with a drowning. Deep in the heart of Mexico City, where five houses cluster around a sun-drenched courtyard, lives Ana, a precocious twelve-year-old still coming to terms with the mysterious death of her little sister years earlier. Over the rainy, smoggy summer she decides to plant a vegetable garden in the courtyard, & as she digs the ground & plants her seeds, her neighbours in turn delve into their past. As the ripple effects of grief, childlessness, illness & displacement saturate their stories, secrets seep out & questions emerge
- Who was my wife? Why did my mom leave? Can I turn back the clock? & how could a girl who knew how to swim drown? Using five voices to tell the singular story of life in an inner city mews, Umami is a quietly devastating novel of missed encounters, missed opportunities, missed people, & those who are left behind. Compassionate, surprising, funny & inventive, it deftly unpicks their stories to offer a darkly comic portrait of contemporary Mexico, as whimsical as it is heart-wrenching.