The Trial of Anna Thalberg

“A novel that can be read with great emotion and great suspense, written with impressive formal virtuosity.” — Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season

“A marvelous work that challenges the reader on multiple levels and communicates directly with our present.” — Cristina Rivera Garza, author of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice

“In Elizabeth Bryer’s translation of Sangarcía’s original Spanish, Anna’s ordeal is narrated like a fever dream, pitting the hideous realities of her incarceration against the paranoid fantasies of her accusers. Tortured to “extract a truth that was not true,” she offers an innocently implacable resistance that infuriates the cleric who’s been tasked with gaining her confession.In Elizabeth Bryer’s translation of Sangarcía’s original Spanish, Anna’s ordeal is narrated like a fever dream, pitting the hideous realities of her incarceration against the paranoid fantasies of her accusers. Tortured to “extract a truth that was not true,” she offers an innocently implacable resistance that infuriates the cleric who’s been tasked with gaining her confession.” — Alida Becker, The New York Times

“Misogyny and religious conviction are vicious bedfellows in Eduardo Sangarcía’s horrifying, humbling … inferno of a historical novel, burning through the lies told about defiant women across the centuries.” — Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

“Sangarcía pulls together an astute account of Anna’s trial and sheds light on how witch hunts were rooted in the hatred and suspicion of women (’little girls like you only bring misfortunes and calamities’). The prose, lyrical and scarcely punctuated, matches the plot’s frenzied pace. Fans of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season will love this.“ — Publisher’s Weekly

“As bleak as it is beautiful. Sangarcía has given us a story that is breathlessly told, formally innovative, and lays bare our all-too-common tendency towards cruelty, while never foregoing his own humanity. Welcome to a new, luminous voice in literature.” — Elizabeth Gonzalez James, author of The Bullet Swallower

“Eduardo Sangarcía’s writing blends a sophisticated feeling for history with penetrating intuition about human consciousness to conjure elegant nightmares. One of the most attractive voices of contemporary Mexican literature.” — Julián Herbert, author of Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino

“A merciless chronicle of witchcraft trials that is more than a mere testimony of the times: it is also a trial of the violence that has historically been exercised against women. With a coven of torrential voices, Eduardo Sangarcía lays bare the unreasonableness of a past that also speaks of our present.” — Juan Gómez Bárcena, author of Not Even the Dead

“With an audacious style, a singular use of juxtaposed dialogue, and a structure reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Eduardo Sangarcía achieves a narrative feat that keeps us hooked until the very last line. Although we know what will happen, since he has advertised it from the beginning, we believe in the unexpected, hoping for the miracle to occur. In the end, he both pleases and surprises us, just the way great literature ought to do.” — Yoss, author of A Planet for Rent

“With breathless rhythm and a raging as well as plaintive tone … the novel builds a magnificent celebration of the feminine.” — Le monde

Eduardo Sangarca is the author of El desconocido del Meno (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro), a collection of short stories that was awarded the prestigious Premio Nacional de Cuento Joven Comala 2017. He is currently studying for a Ph.D. in Humanities with a specialization on Latin American literature of the Holocaust. He lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.