Ana Paula Maia

Ana Paula Maia

Translated by Zoë Perry

By the International Booker Prize Longlisted Author of On Earth As It Is Beneath

Animals go mad and men die (accidentally and not) at a slaughterhouse in an impoverished, isolated corner of Brazil. In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over again, as the stun operator at Senhor Milo’s slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It’s important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled: they have begun to run in panic into walls and over cliffs. Bronco Gil, the foreman, thinks it’s a jaguar or a wild boar. Edgar Wilson has other suspicions. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness. 

Ana Paula Maia

Translated by Padma Viswanathan

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.

Publishing August 2026

Ana Paula Maia

Translated by Padma Viswanathan

On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down. But in the prison’s waning days, a new horror is unleashed: every full-moon night, the inmates are released, the warden is armed with rifles, and the hunt begins. Every man plans his escape, not knowing if his end will come at the hands of a familiar face, or from the unknown dangers beyond the prison walls.  Ana Paula Maia has once again delivered a bracing vision of our potential for violence, and our collective failure to account for the consequences of our social and political action, or inaction. No crime is committed out of view for this novelist, and her raw, brutal power enlists us all as witness.