Pages of Mourning – Two Dollar Radio
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Pages of Mourning

a novel by
Diego Gerard Morrison


$ 14.21 $ 18.95
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Pages of Mourning, a novel by Diego Gerard Morrison (Two Dollar Radio, 2024)

"Aureliano Más may be named for 19 characters from One Hundred Years of Solitude and may hail from Comala, Mexico, the literal ghost town in Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, but he sees magical realism as pure fantasy that serves to soothe a country riven by forced disappearances. Pages of Mourning follows Aureliano’s attempts to dismantle the genre as he writes a novel about his mother, who vanished when he was an infant. It’s an inventive work of metafiction that grapples with the horrific realities of Mexico’s drug wars and the families left grieving without bodies to bury."
—Kristen Martin, NPR: Books We Love 2024


Pages of Mourning is a stunning achievement, a pioneering and inventive novel that confronts family history, creativity, Magical Realism, and the impact of violence from Mexico’s drug war, by a magnificent new talent in Diego Gerard Morrison.

It’s 2017 and the crisis of forced disappearances has reached a tipping point after 43 docent students disappeared and are feared dead. Aureliano Más the Second is a fledgling writer at a lucrative fellowship in Mexico City chaired by his aunt, Rose. When Aureliano was very young, his mother left without reason or trace. Aureliano is attempting to write a novel that mirrors his mother’s unexplained disappearance while shattering Magical Realism as a genre in the process. It doesn’t help though, that he’s named after the protagonist of a touchstone of the Magical Realist canon, and raised in the mythical town of Comala.

Aureliano searches for insight and closure from his father and from Rose, who grappled with his mother’s disappearance through a failed novel of her own. Their stories lead back to the 1980’s and the burgeoning drug trade, as Rose and Aureliano’s mother journey as young runaways throughout the Mexican countryside. Meanwhile, Aureliano’s addictions and the overwhelming burden of the past threaten his tenuous position at the fellowship, just as a deadly earthquake strikes Mexico City on the exact same date as a legendary earthquake struck in 1985.

Pages of Mourning is a daring, captivating, darkly funny novel that grapples with uncertainty and loss in a land of violence and superstition, while questioning whether Magical Realism as a genre is capable of confronting the brutal dissonance of a country that awaits the return of the missing while not wholly acknowledging their death. Monumental, lyrical, and engrossing, Pages of Mourning is a towering accomplishment by one of the most exciting new writers at work today.

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