Pink Slime: A Novel

Longlisted for the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for Translated Literature • Named a BEST BOOK of the Year by NPR, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, and ScreenRant • “The disconcerting familiarity of this strange, windswept world will haunt you.” —Esquire

A hair-raising, poetic work of literary horror and climate fiction about a woman and the people who depend on her as the world around them edges toward apocalypse.

In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining relationships: with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind.

An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, Pink Slime is buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency. This vivid and unforgettable translated novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge.

Fernanda Trías is an award-winning Uruguayan writer based in Colombia, and the author of four novels and two short story collections. Her novels The Rooftop and Pink Slime have been published in English, and translation rights to her work have been sold in twenty languages. Pink Slime was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and received Uruguay’s National Literature Prize, the Bartolomé Hidalgo Critics’ Award, and Mexico’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. In 2025, Trías became only the second writer in the history of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize to win the award twice, receiving it for The Mountain Woman, which was widely featured on best-of-the-year lists across the Spanish-speaking world.

Heather Cleary, a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, is a translator of poetry and prose from Spanish whose work has been recognized by the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, the National Book Foundation, English PEN, and the International Booker Prize, among others. The author of The Translator's Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction, she holds a PhD from Columbia University and is currently writing a novel about translation and betrayal.