A Sunny Place for Shady People Stories

By: Mariana Enriquez

Published by Random House, 2025-09-09

WORLD FANTASY AWARD FINALIST • BRAM STOKER AWARD FINALIST • A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by “Buenos Aires’s sorceress of horror” (Samanta Schweblin, The New York Times)

“Entertaining, political and exquisitely gruesome, these stories summon terror against the backdrop of everyday horrors. . . . A queen of horror delivers more delightfully twisted stories.”—Los Angeles Times

“As vivid and essential as Kafka’s tales.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • IGNYTE AWARD FINALIST • LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, THE TELEGRAPH, ELECTRIC LIT, PASTE, LATINA MEDIA

On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women.

Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. A neighborhood nuisanced by ghosts, a family whose faces melt away, a faded hotel haunted by a girl who dissolved in the water tank on the roof, a riverbank populated by birds that used to be women—these and other tales illuminate the shadows of contemporary life, where the line between good and evil no longer exists.

Lyrical and hypnotic, heart-stopping and deeply moving, Enriquez’s stories never fail to enthrall, entertain, and leave us shaken. Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”