Cross-Stitch

In Cross-Stitch, the debut novel from essayist and writer Jazmina Barrera, the unexpected death of a friend sets this story into motion, where various time periods, stories, conversations and trips are interwoven.

Cross-Stitch narrates the path towards adulthood in a society pierced with sexist, classist, racist and environmental violence. It is a novel about growth, about the imbalances of identity and the adolescent body. Friendship becomes the primary tool for care, feeling, reparation and resistance for its protagonists. Friendship and embroidery, that activity where women from hundreds of different cultures and time periods have found oppression, repression, freedom, community and art.

Christina MacSweeney’s nuanced and beautiful translation guides us on this unforgettable travel chronicle—a chronicle about the effect that trips have on individual and collective identity, and about friendship as travel—with all of its linguistic, emotive, sentimental and cultural problems and discoveries.

‘Needlework is often depicted as a peaceful activity: feminine, unthreatening, decorative. Yet in Jazmina Barrera’s understated and lovely debut novel, Cross-Stitch, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, embroidery is revealed to be as quietly brutal as young womanhood, despite the shroud of innocence society often places over both.’ – The New York Times