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  • Published: 1 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099587590
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $22.99

Prayers for the Stolen




It was Paula’s mother who had the brilliant idea of digging the holes. My mother said that the State of Guerrero was turning into a rabbit warren with young girls hiding all over the place…

‘Now we make you ugly,’ my mother said. ‘The best thing you can be in Mexico is an ugly girl.’

On the mountainside in rural Mexico where Ladydi lives, being a girl is dangerous. Especially a pretty one. If the Narcos hear there is a pretty girl on the mountain, they steal her. So when the black SUVs roll into town, Ladydi and her friends hide in the warren of holes scattered across the mountain, safely out of sight. Because the stolen girls don’t come back.

Ladydi is determined to get out, to find a life that offers more than just the struggle to survive. But she soon finds that the drug cartels have eyes everywhere, and the cities are no safer than the mountains.

  • Published: 1 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099587590
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Jennifer Clement

Jennifer Clement is the President of PEN International. She was born in 1960 and has lived in Mexico since 1961. She is a graduate of New York University. She is the author of the memoir Widow Basquiat and three novels: A True Story Based on Lies, The Poison That Fascinates and Prayers for the Stolen. She is also the author of several books of poetry, and is co-founder and director of the San Miguel Poetry Week. Jennifer Clement was awarded the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Fellowship for Literature 2012. She was President of PEN Mexico from 2009 to 2012 and is a member of Mexico's prestigious Sistema Nacional de Creadores. She lives in Mexico City.

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Praise for Prayers for the Stolen

Prayers For The Stolen is stark and brutal, but not without happiness. "Mexico is a warren of hidden women", says Jennifer Clement. This book is a way of seeing them

Stylist

[Clement] shows the black comedy in the details and the emergency in the broader picture

Gaby Wood, Telegraph

Bleak, but beautifully written… Clement's prose is luminous and startlingly original. The sentences are spare and stripped back, but brilliantly manage to contain complex characters and intense emotional histories in a few vividly poetic words. Her portrayal of modern Mexico is heartbreaking; a dangerous and damaging environment for women, but her portrait of Ladydi and her refusal to be one of the lost girls is defiantly bold and bravely uncompromising

Eithne Farry, Sunday Express

Ladydi’s irreverent voice sings off the page and there are laughs to be had as she relates her mother’s drunken wisdom and seeks to find a way to live

Cathy Retzenbrink, Metro

Despite its violent premise, this is a darkly comic read with one of the funniest, most touching narrators in years, highlighting a very real issue in a remarkably fresh way. An inspiring story of female resilience

Psychologies

With Ladydi, Jennifer Clement has created a feisty teenage heroine who is an unforgettable character

Good Housekeeping

Every sentence in Prayers for the Stolen is direct, potent, unexpected; twisting on the page like a knife in the gut… This work also gives us all of a novel's pleasures – a story laden with significance and drama and meaning, a keen feeling of relationship between reader and characters, a fully realised world through which we may roam

Kirsty Gunn, Guardian

Ladydi’s irreverent voice sings off the page and there are laughs to be had as she relates her mother’s drunken wisdom and seeks to find a way to live

Cathy Retzenbrink, Metro

This book has attracted a huge amount of attention and deservedly so

Four Shires

The theme of Prayers for the Stolen is the wanton violence inflicted on women and the destruction of communities as a result of the drug trade in Mexico, but Clement's eye for the revealing detail, the simple poetry of her language and the visceral authenticity of her characters turn that deadening reality into a compelling, tragically beautiful novel

Yann Martel

The brutal background of this terrific novel is only too real; Clement brings a modern tragedy to vivid life

The Times

Kaleidoscopic... Glints with occasional shards of comedy as black as the charcoal used to obscure female beauty

Sophie Baggott, Times Literary Supplement

This is a harrowing, compelling story, and will stay with you for a very long time

Louise O’Neill, Irish Times

This is an illuminating tale of womanhood in rural Mexico and a stunning portrait of a hopeful heroine in the face of adversity

Antonia Charlesworth, Big Issue

This is a rollercoaster of a novel that will make you laugh, wince and gasp. We look forwards to reading more of Clement’s work

Cambridge News

A moving novel narrated by an open-hearted teenage girl growing up in the borderlands of Mexico controlled entirely by the drug cartels. Lyrical, disturbing and not without optimism, this work deserved far more acclaim when published last year

Kazuo Ishiguro, New Statesman

Lyrical, disturbing and not without optimism

Kazuo Ishiguro, New Statesman

Clement's first-person telling of the story through her spirited narrator…in spare prose delivers emotional immediacy and demands engagement.

Guardian, Book of the Year

Prayers For the Stolen is a magnificent story, as filled with a wisdom so dense and ancient as to seem almost unbearable. One wants to turn away, but cannot. It’s a mesmerizing read, illustrative of the idea that even traces of beauty, deeply felt, can help carry a traveler through the harshest landscape, or the harshest life.

Rick Bass

The most enchanting journey I’ve taken in a long, long time, and the most important. Prayers For The Stolen is a hand-guided tour through a ruthless true corner of our century, with characters so alive they will burrow into your heart like worms. Stunningly written, magically detailed, you see, smell and taste the action on every page, feel every foible, and miss the candour of these funny, achingly human voices long after you put them down. As the heroine herself might say: not something to read but to lick off a plate.

DBC Pierre