Eating Ashes by Brenda Navarro
Eating Ashes is a haunting, profound examination of the complexities of grief, migration, and neglect. With a startling, arresting narrative voice, our unnamed protagonist spirals through memories of her brother before his tragic death, until she develops a compulsion toward touching and tasting her brother’s ashes. Never before have I encountered a book that so perfectly captures the way a mind twists in the throes of grief, the way our thoughts spit and claw and recur, trying to fill a void. This book is beautiful, and sad, and beautiful.
Eating Ashes by Brenda Navarro, (List Price: $24.99, Liveright, 9781324096085, January 2026)
Reviewed by Charlie, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
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I wrote it in a month-long spurt, and sent it to the publisher. I didn’t do any research for the book, but I drew upon years of personal experience, and the history of disabled people that I studied at university helped me, too. I was conscious that it was special in the sense that I knew Shaka was a protagonist of a kind that hadn’t been written before.”
There are books whose urgency barely needs to be articulated because it’s so evident within the work itself, and Hunchback seemed to me like one of those: it burns itself right into the mind of the reader. It’s a cinematic work, that conjures up a dense and vivid world with very little, so the language needed a lot of honing, to make sure that it was hitting all of those imagistic notes in the way that they needed to. I’d say the principal narrative voice came to me quite quickly and intuitively, but there are lots of shifts of register within the span of the book, which took quite a lot of time and attention to capture. ”
I have had relationships with humans, but I’ve also loved a lot of people in stories. I’ve been told by my doctor not to talk about this too much, but ever since I was a child, I’ve had 30 or 40 imaginary friends who live on a different star or planet with whom I have shared love and sexual experiences. ……Some say that the worlds I write about are dystopian, but a lot of people think that actually reality is worse… I’ve often felt love, obsession, desire, friendship, a kind of faith, or almost a prayer-like relationship with these men – and they’ve always been men, so it’s a heterosexual relationship – who live inside stories. With Vanishing World I was trying to create a place where it might be easier for people who find it difficult to live in this world.
