Salt
Ever since a childhood accident, Ema has doubted her bond with her mother, equally troubled and fascinated by her. Years later, now with questions about her own motherhood, she joins a family road trip to her mother’s hometown to quench her need for answers. With deceptively simple language, precise brevity, and vivid imagery, Salt explores daughterhood and unearths a family’s intricate past and secretive present. An intimate, brilliant debut novel by Argentine author Adriana Riva, translated by Denise Kripper.
PRAISE FOR SALT
“Swiftly moving and completely captivating, beautifully translated by Denise Kripper, Salt traces its narrator’s life from a harrowing accident through a long spiral of unknowing to a gorgeously rendered reckoning and rebirth. Fascinating and wonderful.”
-Jennifer Croft, author of The Extinction of Irena Rey
“To enter into Salt, this moving novel, one has to approach it in the same way the narrator engages with her mother: with caution, acknowledging one’s own fragility, to keep from breaking into pieces. In this text, words are at once a blow and a relief. Adriana Riva’s use of language is sharp and spontaneous, without a hint of artifice—her narrative is alive, beating and breathing intensely; emerging from a place where emotions, while expressing recognizable feelings, seem to be born anew.”
-Margarita García Robayo, author of The Delivery (translated by Megan McDowell)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adriana Riva was born in Buenos Aires in 1980. In 2017, she published the short-story collection Angst (Tenemos las máquinas), in 2019 the novel La sal (Odelia), and in 2022 the poetry collection Ahora sabemos esto (Rosa Iceberg). She co-founded the children’s publisher Diente de León, for which she wrote the illustrated books Entre las hojas que cantan, La sartén por el mango, Contar Buenos Aires, and Sol mayor. She is the co-editor of the literary magazine El gran cuaderno. She has three daughters.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Denise Kripper is an Argentine literary translator and translation scholar. She is the translation editor at Latin American Literature Today and the author of Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature (Routledge, 2023). She lives in Chicago, where she is a founding member of the Third Coast Translators Collective.
