Bury Your Dead

A roadkill crew in rural Brazil finds the wrong kind of body.Edgar Wilson has left behind his job as a stunner at the slaughterhouse. He now spends his days collecting the bodies of animals killed on the road, transporting them to a facility where they are ground down in a giant mill and turned into fertiliser. On an otherwise ordinary day, the insistent cries of vultures draw him deep into the brush, where he comes upon the body of a woman hanging from a tree, swaying gently in the stillness. He knows he is not meant to collect human remains – but nothing around him seems to fulfil the role it was meant to play. Neither the police nor the healthcare system has the tools to handle such a scene.With stark, economical prose, Ana Paula Maia constructs a world where the boundaries between animal and human, good and evil, shift and blur. Bury Your Dead confirms the fierce power of Maia’s literary vision, marking her out as one of the most original voices in contemporary Brazilian literature.As in Of Cattle and Men , where she crafted a luminous poetics through a slow, contemplative rhythm, and in On Earth As It Is Beneath , a dizzying thriller in which a prison director hunts down his own inmates, Maia once again sets out to recycle death in search of the sacred – even within the most putrefied remnants of human matter.