Diego jumps from a fifth floor and since then that image has not stopped drilling his sister's head: six seconds and a body crashing to the ground. It is she who looks back and tells the story of the two brothers. Her arrival in the world in a home where life was never fair. The years they spent in Mexico with her grandparents, while her mother was looking for a life in Spain, and it was she, still a child, who took care of Diego. The stage in Madrid, a city that they did not understand and that did not understand them either. The first separation, when she went to Barcelona to make her way and her brother stayed in the place she hated the most. And her return, carrying Diego's ashes, to a Mexico very different from the one she remembered.

This novel narrates the emotional journey of a young woman who intuits the reasons for the suicide of her teenage brother and is the protagonist of her own Ulysses syndrome, in which neither going nor coming back is really destiny. A story of separations and abandonments, of yearning and rage, of loss and initiation into life, in which Brenda Navarro bravely tackles elusive issues such as inequality, xenophobia or rootlessness, and which confirms her as one of the most powerful and audacious narrators of our literature. Intense, visceral and devastating, Ceniza en la boca is a book that burns and raises the painful question of what life is worth living.

This book was made with the support of the Support System for Creation and Cultural Projects (SACPC), through the Promotion of Cultural Projects and Co-investments 2021 stream.