A woman listens to her baby crying. It is a cry that drowns out all other sounds in the world, becoming a background song. The girl breaks out in rashes and scratches herself until she bleeds. Creams, medications, or tying her hands make no difference. The mother is young, yet on the nights she spends sitting under the white kitchen light trying to make ends meet, her adulthood feels unbearably heavy. A weight she can only ease by drinking. The girl grows, and with her, her rashes and secrets. But "the secret always bursts forth, bloodied."
A flor de piel, the dizzying debut novel by Mexican author Nora Muñiz, explores the mother-daughter bond with a fierce gaze and takes us into a suffocating and dark territory to talk about the violences exercised in parenting. Muñiz delivers a fierce and terrifying debut that makes us reflect on care and the possibilities of love, for to what extent can a mother, no matter how fierce, spare her daughter pain? To what extent can the bond with a mother be entirely healthy?

"Nora Muñiz has written a brave and moving novel that immerses us in the doubt of how much of ourselves hides beneath the skin and how everything seeps out against our will. Sometimes, to find ourselves, it is necessary to break a little and let words share the wounds." ―Brenda Navarro

"A flor de piel cuts deep. Nora Muñiz shows no mercy, igniting the skin of all and leaving us with our souls hanging by a thread." ―Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny