130 x 199mm, 212 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2024

In Cross-Stitch, the debut novel from essayist and writer Jazmina Barrera, the unexpected death of a friend launches this novel-tapestry where various time periods, stories, conversations and trips are interwoven.

This is a story about growth, about the imbalances of identity and the adolescent body. Cross-Stitch narrates the path towards adulthood in a society pierced with sexist, classist, racist and environmental violence. Friendship becomes the primary tool for care, feeling, reparation and resistance for the protagonists of this book. Friendship and embroidery, that activity where women from hundreds of different cultures and time periods have found oppression, repression, freedom, community and art.

Christina MacSweeney's nuanced and beautiful translation guides us on this travel chronicle—or a chronicle about the effect that trips have on individual and collective identity, and about friendship as travel—with all of its linguistic, emotive, sentimental and cultural problems and discoveries.

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