Book description
Mariana Enriquez's A Sunny Place for Shady People is her first story collection since the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, the occult and the macabre, the stories explore love, womanhood, LGBTQ counterculture, parenthood and Argentina's brutal past.
Why read it?
2 authors picked A Sunny Place for Shady People as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I love the mixture of realism and creepy surrealism in this collection of short stories. I especially admire how Enriquez ties these together so that the surreal elements feel linked to the reality and current events of the protagonists’ lives.
I love that each story centers on complete women with all their obsessions, compulsions, fears, wild senses of humor, and sometimes unusual desires. For me, it is exhilarating, entertaining, and impactful. One of my favorite stories is about a woman who repurposes her uterine fibroid in a one-of-a-kind way—just imagine!
From Sommer's list on unlikable women in fantastical everyday situations.
It may be the social environments which her characters inhabit, but menace is never far away in this author's stories. They treat impossible or unusual events with acceptance. Menace is never far away.
The best stories are Different Colours Made of Tears, Black Eyes and Metamorphosis.
If you love A Sunny Place for Shady People...
The Rosewood Penny
2023 Queer Indie Award Nominee!
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
Want books like A Sunny Place for Shady People?
Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like A Sunny Place for Shady People.
Share your top 3 reads of 2025!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
1,342
readers submitted
so far, will you?
📚 If you like A Sunny Place for Shady People, you might also like...
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
Malcolm Before X
Malcolm Before X is about finding a way to continue moving forward after everything has been taken from you. While in prison, Malcolm Little discovered the power of reading and found a way to transform his character and become a better man. This half-biography focuses on that transformation, especially his…
