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When Pluta’s father, a university professor, disappears amid the turmoil of Argentina’s Dirty War, her family’s idyllic life crumbles. Unsure where he’s been taken or whether he’s even alive, Pluta and her mother struggle to cope with the disappearance—and to voice their fears and pain to one another.
Exiled to a boarding school in New York and churning with unresolved grief, Pluta runs away to Brooklyn in 1980. Her harrowing and surreal experiences on the dangerous streets soon threaten to destroy her completely—but may also at last break through the suffocating silence that has held her family captive.
"A chilling and beautiful novel that has left its indelible mark on me—I am simply in awe of Anca Szilagyi's prose."—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
“Isabel and Pluta’s isolation get to the heart of what’s driving this novel: the many shames of political violence and the trauma of uncertainty. It’s easy to see the injustice of Argentina’s Dirty War in all its terrible dimension in hindsight, but what Szilágyi reveals is the sheer torment of experiencing it while it was happening without the benefit of perspective or reflection.”—Leena Soman for Cleaver Magazine
“…I want to read a book that pushes me so far beyond my own experience as a human and a writer that I’m already off the cliff and halfway to a crushing death before I realize what’s happening. Daughters of the Air took me there.” —Isla McKetta
“Her work feels like a fairy tale—the sort of thing you’d find handwritten on a tiny scroll... under a mushroom in the middle of a forest on the longest day of the year."—Seattle Review of Books
“Simultaneously elegiac and remarkably propulsive, Daughters of the Air tells the story of Tatiana (aka Pluta) a girl attempting to break away from her past, while haunted by her father, who was “disappeared” by the Argentine government. The book offers a moving and memorable exploration of how the traumas of history burrow into individuals and fester, sprouting strange and sometimes even lovely phenomena.”—Peter Mountford, author of A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism and The Dismal Science
“Pluta, the teenage heroine of Daughters of the Air, flees from one dark place to others darker still, from one unfulfilled promise of escape to another. Yet, in art, in opera, in the lusciousness of Anca Szilágyi’s language, she soars.”—Maya Sonenberg
“Anca Szilágyi writes with an elegant economy that gives her work a moving urgency and a lushness that is uplifting. Crafting characters and moments of unexpected brilliance, Anca weaves narratives imbued with an original beauty. A pure delight.”—Chris Abani, The Secret History of Las Vegas and Sanctificum