Reviews
“I was astonished by how many huge ideas could fit into this taut, swift novella by Brenda Peynado: it’s all at once a meditation on motherhood, grief, war, environmental collapse, dread, and the nature of memory and time; yet the book is miraculously also buoyant, thrilling, a breathless and headlong read for a breathtaking time on this planet. I ate it up.”—Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author
“Time’s Agent is a gorgeous mediation on grief, colonialism, love and parenthood. Sharp and sparkling.”—Lauren Beukes, bestselling author of The Shining Girls
“At once an incredibly human story about family and sacrifice as well as a staggering work of anti-capitalist eco fiction, Time’s Agent is heartbreaking, inspiring, genius.”—Reactor
“There are huge, fascinating ideas laced throughout this story of shattering grief… Fans of Carmen Maria Machado will find in this debut novelist a new author to follow every bit as voraciously.“—Library Journal, starred review
Praise for The Rock Eaters
“Peynado is a writer willing to cross literary borders.“—Julia Alvarez
“Peynado conjures both the playful sorcery of Kelly Link and the haunted atmosphere of Kali Fajardo-Anstine.”—NPR
“A genre-bending sociopolitical commentary with prose that shines.”—The Washington Post
“Each of Peynado’s storis is finely formed as a diamond…Wily but throbbing with heart, they dart into unexpected crevices of human experience…They speak to our unkempt, scarred world, even as they reimagine it not just once, but repeatedly.”—The San Francisco Chronicle
“Brenda Peynado’s The Rock Eaters only came out in 2021, but listening to it, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s been around long enough to be a modern magical realist classic.”—Paste
“Genre-bending brilliance . . . Peynado’s harnessing of the diasporic imagination establishes her as a true magician of the marvelous real.”—The Boston Globe
