Sabrina & Corina

Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection--a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands.

"Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart."--Sandra Cisneros

Kali Fajardo-Anstine's magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado--a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite--these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

In "Sugar Babies," ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. "Any Further West" follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In "Tomi," a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, "Sabrina & Corina," a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.

Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.

Advance praise for Sabrina & Corina

"Sabrina & Corina isn't just good, it's masterful storytelling. Fajardo-Anstine is a fearless writer: her women are strong and scarred witnesses of the violations of their homelands, their culture, their bodies; her plots turn and surprise, unerring and organic in their comprehensiveness; her characters break your heart, but you keep on going because you know you are in the hands of a master. Her stories move through the heart of darkness and illuminate it with the soul of truth."--Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

"A terrific collection of stories--fiercely and beautifully made." --Joy Williams

"Kali Fajardo-Anstine writes about hard truths in women's lives so knowingly, and with such a deft touch, I felt hyper-alert, as well as implicated and imperiled. In these achingly convincing stories, the writer is writing delicately, symbolically, about mortality itself."--Ann Beattie