Clara is a graduate student with a stable relationship, professional goals, and her own routine in Mexico City, until one day she receives a call informing her that her mother is “very nervous”. From that moment on, Clara’s life begins to crumble along with the personality of her mother’s, who had been a clandestine during the Argentine dictatorship and then came into exile to Mexico, weighed down by the ghosts of her past.

After the cracks in her maternal figure start surfacing and euphemisms sneak in in every conversation, Clara can no longer ignore the emotional burden of the political persecution suffered by her family. And while her mother withdraws from reality, isolating herself in baffling logic and language, she has to reckon with a sentimental past that is also her own, although she does not want to admit it.

Ana Negri explores the legacy of exile while trying to untangle the threads of history and identity, revealing how language can both keep us safe and distort the truth. The Euphemisms is a delicate and witty novel, pepped up with dark humour, where the traumatic memory of the Argentine dictatorship acts like a time bomb that only the anger and tenderness of a daughter towards her mother could defuse.

 

“Ana Negri has written a beautiful novel. It is beautiful because she has taken the risk of combining casualness with the deepest elegiac tones. And it is beautiful also because it responds to the ideal of transforming darkness into light.” – Roberto Pliego, Milenio

“A balance between reality and fiction, but above all between fiction and language, because it is the care with which the story is written, pointed out, and recorded what makes The Euphemisms a novel worth reading. […] Humour, one of the essential components of this narrative, tempers it.” – Gabriela Alburquenque, Origami

 “The Euphemisms is a room with lights and shadows in which Negri advances fearlessly, breaking that darkness with twists of language, pushing syntax and rhythm until the light peeks through.” – Mauricio Ruiz, Letras Libres

“Sharp and with black humour, a story which shows the complexity of affections in mother-daughter relationships” – Nicolás Meneses, Loqueleímos

“The novel reads quickly, keeping you in a back-and-forth of emotions that makes the reading very enjoyable. It is a book that is difficult to put down once you start it, and whose writing does not feel dense, but is full of content, emotions and interrelations. […] The Euphemisms does not present violence as something physical and finite, but as an echo capable of being transmitted through memory and reappearing when we no longer thought of it.” – María José Rojas, Copadas

 “This short, beautiful, and painful novel deals with family, individual and collective trauma, both emotional and political, and with the possible or impossible reparation, even if it is by the next generation, and it leaves you wanting to read more by Ana Negri.” –  Bruno Galindo, La Lectura

“With her prose Ana Negri pierces the exile, the irreparable and its patches. […] So carefully crafted that it flows as if passing by, Ana Negri’s prose drags the reader […] through the hellish traffic of Mexico City towards the no less diabolical bureaucracy of the Argentine embassy” – Jorge Piendo, El Cohete a la Luna

“A moving and intimate book, at the same time private and public, in which the protagonist is trapped in labyrinths of papers, traffic lights, stamps, elevators, separations, and especially twists of language.” – Valeria Tentoni

“The Euphemisms is an intimate story that confronts us with those unspeakable things that leave indelible marks.” – Aristegui

“The Euphemisms conceal the horrors, traumas, fears, and resentments of a mother and a daughter. […] This mother-daughter relationship is narrated with a visceral quality that gives an understanding of […] the distance that words must travel to get from one side to the other.” – Paulette R. Fernández, Jámpster

“A sort of inward spiral, towards the centre of the relationship between Clara and her mother […] A novel to which one must surrender as one would to jazz.” – Leonardo González, El desconcierto

“A short and intense novel that makes us wonder: what are the invisible threads that connect us to our mothers?” – Ignacio Rojas, Nadar de noche

“There is a story hidden behind the words, a physical, institutional, historical violence and how the dictatorship permeates the body […] A limbo where the children of exiled people, who are born in another country, find themselves, [… and] another limbo, that of “the broken”, as the exiled mother calls herself: those who were not mortal victims, nor are listed among the disappeared.” – Ana León, Noticias 22 Digital

 “With a measured style that underpins the pain with careful prose […] what Negri shows is the evolution of the relationship, with its ups and downs, with moments of tenderness and care as well as exhaustion and despair.” – Sara Paola Matero Gutiérrez, Criticismo

“Ana Negri shows that small insinuations can grow into a catapult and a detonator […]. It is also a novel that celebrates an intimate style, […] an unsuspected depth which the novel gradually reveals.” – Rober Díaz, Julio Astillero

“A profound reflection on language, identity and the symbolic boundaries we cross every day without realizing it. […] It updates and questions exile from a new angle, presenting it as an inheritance that can be very heavy, but also proposing considering it through the emotional ties formed with the family and the environment we inhabit.” – Ulises Valderrama Abad, Senalc

“A novel in which there are fatigued, erroneous, endemic and intermittent bonds. Exile, tenderness, rage, pain. How the history of those around us marks our own, how one can desire without being weighted down or poisoned by what happened. The complex balance between the pronouns you and I.” – Solidaridad Digital

“An emotional challenge. From the title, you can already imagine that it will leave wounds. A narrative rhythm that always finds the balance between the blinding light of the daughter’s day-to-day life and the persistent darkness that blurs the mother.” – Sonia Fides, El Asombrario

“Ana Negri roams through the mind of an escapist woman, daughter of a persecuted mother. Between the columns of tobacco smoke, the figures of reparation are formed, but the past is painful. A family story pierced with exile, which displaces and separates the bodies.” — Daniela Tarazona

 

 

168 pages – Original language: Spanish/Mexico (Antílope, 2021); Spanish/Chile (Los Libros de la Mujer Rota, 2020). Foreign editions: Spanish/Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica (Firmamento, 2021); French (Globe, 2022); English/UK (Charco Press, 2026).