Pink Slime

A woman in a coastal city hit by an unexplained plague is trying to make sense of how everything fell apart. Algae has contaminated the sea air that once arrived clean and fresh. Further inland, a closed-off company manufactures the only food most people can pay for, a strange pink paste whose ingredients nobody can name. Between windstorms that can kill, the narrator keeps up the few bonds she has left: with her hard-edged but fragile mother, with the ex-husband she still cares for, and with the young boy she looks after, whose parents sent him away as danger closed in.

As conditions outside keep getting worse, she grows more determined to stay where she is, even though staying may mean being abandoned by everyone else. The novel reads as a mournful tribute to a world that was safe and clean, yet its humor and the narrator's stubborn endurance keep it from sinking into despair. It is a translation of a Spanish-language novel by Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías, and it was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature.