El celo
» Best Book of the Year (El Cultural)
El celo is a story about domestication, curses, the animality of desire, fear as inheritance, and the power of tales, poltergeists, mad dogs, and a family history built on bites and silence.
The night she found the dog, the woman was high. That’s why she let it follow her home. Now, she lives with an animal that fills up with all the energy she lacks and suddenly goes into an uncontrollable heat. The woman is thirty-two years old, but she no longer desires. She is in life, but she does not live it. She recently arrived in the city, fleeing her days in the countryside with a boyfriend she had. She suffers from strange symptoms, tremors, and bruises that appear on their own. One day, she bends down to tie her shoelaces and discovers she can’t. The woman fears a curse that is advancing. To get the psychiatrist to prescribe more anxiolytics, she will meet Mecha, a fascinating woman who, along with the dog, becomes an animal difficult to save.
PRESS
«Sabina Urraca writes about females in heat, punished, mistreated, lovers, loved, wild, hunted, together in a pack. She writes about matriarchy, illness, loss of innocence, sisterhood, fear, and heartbreak, but above all, she tells our stories: those of all the rabid bitches.» María Fernanda Ampuero
«Let the reader not expect a condescending or conventional story. This is a book by Sabina Urraca, and while the pain is there, it intersperses with an acidic and dazzling humor that explores everything ridiculous about us humans, with a lucid look at the whys of how we are. All this narrated with an enveloping and sharp prose, raw and uncomfortable, capable of speaking without euphemisms and confronting the reader with their prejudices and contradictions.» Andrés Seoane, El Mundo
