“Buckle up—Candeleria is a literary ride unlike any other. A wild journey through generational trauma, untold truths, sibling rivalry and intimacy via backroads lined with cinema, cult fitness and the supernatural. Fear not, though the landscape Lozada-Oliva creates is utterly original and chaotic at times, she is a masterful guide whom I would follow anywhere. Heartbreaking, hilarious and absurd in the very best way, Candelaria sticks to your soul and leaves you seeing the world and the people in it a bit differently.” —Xochitl Gonzalez, Pulitzer Prize Finalist and author of Olga Dies Dreaming

Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

A sweeping, mystical novel following three generations of women as they grapple with muddled pasts and predetermined futures, Candelaria is a story of love that eats us alive from the author of Dreaming of You, Melissa Lozada-Oliva.

Your granddaughters are lost, Candelaria. Bianca, the brainy archaeologist, had to forfeit her life’s work in Guatemala after her advisor seduced and deserted her. Paola, missing for over a decade, resurfaces in Boston as a brainwashed wellness cultist named Zoe. And Candy, the youngest, is a recovering addict who finds herself pregnant by a man she’s not even sure ever existed. None of this concerns you of course, until a cataclysmic earthquake hits Boston. Now you must traverse the crumbling city to reach the Watertown Mall Old Country Buffet—for a reason you still cannot disclose—battling strange entities and your own strange past to save your granddaughters and possibly the world.

Told with tongue-in-cheek humor and sharp cultural criticism, Candelaria is an unsettling, raucous debut novel that unearths one troubled family’s legacy, feasting on diasporic identity politics and examining the limits of bodily autonomy and the dangers of wanting to belong at any cost.