Bury Your Dead

By the International Booker Prize Shortlisted Author of On Earth As It Is Beneath Edgar Wilson has a gruesome job, one he is entirely unsentimental about--he cleans up roadkill in rural Brazil. But one day vultures are circling in the woods, and he can't not go see what they're gathering for. What transpires is a quest--a miserable day-long journey--for a couple of poor working men who only want to acknowledge that everybody (and in this case, every literal body) has the right to be treated as more than just scrap or trash. Dead animals, defrocked priests, corpses abandoned in the woods, and a criminal outfit trafficking in body parts--Bury Your Dead is an exhortation, a road trip, a story of friendship, and a hymn to the small ways we can shape the world. Ana Paula Maia's alchemy with the grimmest of ingredients makes this her more hopeful, generous novel yet.

Ana Paula Maia is the author of On Earth As It Is Beneath, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Her novel Of Cattle and Men won the UK Republic of Consciousness Prize, the inaugural Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation in the United States, and an English PEN Translates Award. An award-winning Brazilian writer and scriptwriter, she is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Brazilian fiction.