We are delighted that the incredible THE FIVE WOUNDS by Kirstin Valdez Quade has been crowned Booksellers’ Association Indie Book of the Month! Look out for this stunning story of family and sacrifice in your local independent bookshop.
ABOUT THE BOOK
From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel following one family’s extraordinary year of love and sacrifice.
An Amazon Best Book of April 2021
Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021 by Oprah Magazine, The Week, The Millions, and Electric Lit.
July 2021 Book of the Month for Roxane Gay’s Book Club
It’s Holy Week in the town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla is to play Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep.
Vivid, darkly funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and Tío Tíve, keeper of the family’s history. In the absorbing, realist tradition of Elizabeth Strout and Jonathan Franzen, Kirstin Valdez Quade brings to life the struggles of her characters to parent children they may not be equipped to save.
Buy your copy
This year Amadeo Padilla is Jesus. The hermanos have been preparing in the dirt yard behind the morada.
This is no silky-haired, rosy-cheeked, honey-eyed Jesus, no Jesus-of-the-children, Jesus-with-the-lambs. Amadeo is muscled, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from teenage fights, roll of skin where skull meets neck.
Amadeo is building the cross out of heavy rough oak instead of pine. He’s barefoot like the other hermanos, who have rolled their cuffs and sing alabados. They have washed their white pants, braided their disciplinas the old way, from the thick fibers of yucca leaves, mended rips in the black hoods they will wear to ensure their humility in this reenactment. The Hermano Mayor— Amadeo’s skinny grand- tío Tíve, who surprised them all when he chose his niece’s lazy son— plays the pito, and the thin piping notes rise.
Today Amadeo woke with the idea of studding the cross with nails to give it extra weight. He holds the hammer with both hands high above his head, brings it down with a crack. The boards bounce, the sound strikes off the outside wall of the morada and, across the alley, the Idle Hour Cantina.
Amadeo has broken out in a sweat. Amadeo sweats, but not usually from work. He sweats when he eats, he sweats when he drinks too much. Thirty- three years old, same as Our Lord, but Amadeo is not a man with ambition. Even his mother will tell you that, though it breaks her heart to admit it. Yolanda still cooks for him, setting a plate before him at his place at the table.
This afternoon, though, even Amadeo’s tattoos seem to strain with his exertion, and he’s seeing himself from outside and above. A flaming Sacred Heart beats against his left pectoral, sweat drips from the point of a bloodied dagger on his bicep, and the roses winding around his side bloom against the heat of his effort. On his back, the Guadalupana glistens brilliantly, her dress scarred with the three vertical cuts of the sellos, the secret seals of obligation. The lines, each the length of a man’s hand, are raised and pink and newly healed, evidence of his initiation into the hermandad.
Though Amadeo has lived in Las Penas his whole life, today he sees the village anew: the lines are sharper, the colors purer. The weeds along the edge of the fence, the links of the fence itself, the swaying tops of the cottonwood trees— everything is in preternatural focus. The morada is lit by the sun sinking orange at his back, the line sharp between cinderblock and sky. He brings the hammer down, hitting each nail true, enjoying the oiled rotation of his joints, the fatigue in his muscles. He feels righteous and powerful, his every movement predetermined. He feels born for the role.
Then he pounds the last nail, and he’s back in his body, and the hermanos are wrapping up, heading home.
———
When Amadeo pulls up the gravel drive to the house, his daughter Angel is sitting on the steps, eight months pregnant. She lives in Española with her mom. He hasn’t seen her in more than a year, but he’s heard the news from his mother, who heard it from Angel.
White tank top, black bra, gold cross pointing the way to her breasts in case you happened to miss them. Belly as hard and round as an horno. The buttons of her jeans are unsnapped to make way for its fullness, and also to indicate how this happened in the first place. Her birthday is this week, falls on Good Friday. She’ll be sixteen.
“Shit,” Amadeo says, and yanks the parking brake. This last week was the most important week in Jesus’s life. This is the week everything happened. So Amadeo’s mind should be trained on sacrifice and resurrection, not his daughter’s teen pregnancy.
She must not see his expression, because she gets up, smiles, and waves with both hands. The rosary swings on his rearview mirror, and Amadeo watches as, beyond it, his daughter advances on the truck, stomach outthrust. She pauses, half turns, displays her belly.
She’s got a big gold purse with her, and a duffel bag, he sees, courtesy of Marlboro. Angel’s hug is straight on, belly pressing into him.
“I’m fat, huh? I barely got these pants and already they’re too small.”
“Hey.” He pats his daughter’s back gingerly between her bra straps, then steps away. “What’s happening?” he says. It’s too casual, but he can’t afford to let her think she’s welcome, not during Passion Week, and with his mother away.
“Ugh. Me and Mom got in a fight, so I told her to drive me here.” Her tone is light. “I didn’t know where you and Gramma were. I’ve been here, like, two hours, starving my head off. Pregnant people need to eat. I almost broke in just to make a sandwich. Don’t you guys check your phones?”
Amadeo hooks his thumbs in his pockets, looks up at the house, then back at the road. The sun is gone now, the dusk a nearly electric blue.
“A fight?” In spite of himself, Amadeo takes some pleasure in Angel’s indignation at her mother. Marissa has always made him feel insufficient.
“I can’t even. Whatever,” she says with conviction. “What me and the baby need right now is a support system. That’s what I told her.”
Amadeo shakes his head. “I’m real busy,” he says, like an actor portraying regret. “Now’s not a good time.”
Angel doesn’t look hurt, just interested. “Why? You got a job or something?”
She lifts her duffel and begins to walk toward the door, swaying under the weight of luggage and belly. “My mom’s not here,” he calls. He’s embarrassed to tell her the real reason he wants her gone, embarrassed by the fervor that being a penitente implies.
“Where’d Gramma go?” There’s real worry in her voice. She holds the screen open with her hip, waiting for him to unlock the door.
“Listen, it’s a busy week.” He rushes this next part, his breath short. “I’m carrying the cross this year. I’m Jesus.”
‘…I don’t know what comes after, once I decide to let desire have its way with me. How to un-melt the melted? How to turn the ground powder back into a person? This idea points to a knowledge that I don’t have: how to love without losing the self.’
We are thrilled to be publishing To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, a ‘hugely significant autobiographical novel about queer friendship, gay life and the early days of the AIDS crisis’ by French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) on the Serpent’s Tail Classics list this July.
The Last House on Needless Street is finally out!
Catriona Ward was born in Washington, DC and grew up in the US, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen, and Morocco. Her debut Rawblood won Best Horror Novel at the 2016 British Fantasy Awards, and was a WHSmith Fresh Talent title. Little Eve won the Shirley Jackson Award, was a Guardian best book of 2018 and won the Best Horror Novel at the 2019 British Fantasy Awards. She lives in London and Devon.