The Summer of the Serpent

A kaleidoscopic descent into the small violences and hidden horrors of a sweltering Guadalajara summer

Guadalajara, Mexico, 1977. In a quiet residential neighborhood, children witness things they can never forget: a serpent girl weeping in a carnival glass box, a neighbor who dangles his dog from a tree, and a ghost who returns night after night, desperate to tell its story. Meanwhile, the grown-ups drift through the season half-oblivious, their spirits eroding as the relentless summer wears on.

Told in colliding voices—children and adults, ghosts and the haunted, the living and the almost-invisible—The Summer of the Serpent is a prismatic portrait of the past, where memory is shot through with myth. Each narrator offers a fragment of the truth, until the stories twist together into a shape as elusive and mesmerizing as the boa constrictor that winds its way through the neighborhood.

Strange yet deeply human, this brilliantly fragmented novel captures the moment when childhood innocence begins to corrode—and how those memories can coil through a lifetime.