Wishbone
by Laia Jufresa

Available May 26, 2026
408 pages • $24
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Tor Sima is the founder of the International Museum of Color in Oaxaca. Vica Luft is a secretary and single mother in Edinburgh. Disparate as their lives are, they mirror and inform one another in striking ways: an early trauma, a shared lover, an affinity for the octopus. Moving backward in time across two decades and seven cities, Wishbone quietly unravels what ties them together and what sets them apart. This is a captivating story about motherhood and friendship, art and commerce, selfhood and loss; about the parts of us that go missing when a loved one disappears, and the tentacular bonds forged by the families we create.

Laia Jufresa’s first book written in English, Wishbone is dreamy and precise, insightful and thrilling: a work of lived-in magic with a colorful cast of irresistible characters, a dazzlingly inventive structure, and a stunning final revelation.

Laia Jufresa is a Mexican author based in Edinburgh. She is the author of the widely acclaimed novel Umami and the memoir Veinte, veintiuno. In 2017 she was named one of the Bogotá39, a list of Latin America’s outstanding young writers under forty. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and appeared in McSweeney’s, Vogue, and El País, among others. Wishbone is her second novel.

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She works until the outside light is no longer light enough. Her throat is dry. She turns on a lamp, crosses the room to fill a glass at the sink, and drinks it so fast the water falls from her mouth. She pours it over her neck, her T-shirt, her bare legs. Then she stands there, dripping, considering the rectangle on the wall. The lower two-thirds is now filled with greens and browns and blues and a single terracotta stain. She stares, trying to look at what she’s done, but all she can see is what she’s still going to do.

Everything is alive in Laia Jufresa’s breathtaking Wishbone. People, objects, landscapes are equally imbued with a force that ripples across timelines and connects us deeply to this enchanted and disenchanted world full of unforgettable characters. A tour de force of a novel from one of the most charming and original voices of my generation.

Valeria Luiselli, author of Beginning Middle End

In Wishbone, Laia Jufresa constructs a dazzling narrative architecture: a novel that moves backward in time while revealing, with relentless precision, the forces that sustain and fracture a life. Its structure invites the reader to unspool a secret rather than follow a plot. Laia Jufresa takes color to its furthest consequences, turning it into memory and wound—a powerful meditation on art, loss, and creation.

Fernanda Trías, author of Pink Slime

I admire the rare combination of literary experiment with great warmth for the world, characters, art, cities, and landscapes. Wishbone is kaleidoscopic and friendly, elegantly brilliant on art and artists while deeply committed to love in all its messy, human forms. Laia Jufresa writes beautifully.

Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater

Laia Jufresa does what writers are supposed to do: highlight the strangeness of a very old world. Wishbone is a beautiful book that grabs your eyes and holds on to them so that you can experience new ways of seeing the pleasures and misdeeds of our present.

Yuri Herrera, author of Season of the Swamp

A page-turner about the unlikely ways art ties people to place and to one another. Spanning cities like Oaxaca, Paris, and Köln, Wishbone propels the reader backward in time, reuniting a family, reviving dead characters, unmaking closely kept secrets, and drilling into the source of an unmatched color palette that drenches each page in hues of “blood,” “bubblegum,” and “browngreengreyery.”

Sarah Minor, author of Carousel: An Essay on Seeing

This novel is a magnificent octopus that uses tentacles of exacting, luminous words to link continents, nationalities, and relationships. Wishbone invents new colors made of joy and luck, such that even in the midst of irreparable loss and forced disappearance the reader will swim in an ocean of alchemical beauty.

Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender Is the Flesh

Wishbone’s ambition and originality come not only from its structure and the way the story moves through time and space, but also from the nuanced, intelligent, and often humorous exploration of its characters, creating a poignant meditation on art and grief that had me gasping throughout.

Daniel Saldaña Paris, author of The Dance and the Fire

This is it, the novel that proves there is no one writing like Jufresa today: with the insight to build a truly international, motley cast; the pluck and playfulness to plunge us into meandering, teasing structures; and the heart to shine a warm light over lives touched by all kinds of loss. The depth of this novel’s understanding will leave you as breathless as its revelations. 

Sophie Hughes, award-winning translator from Spanish and Italian

I never wanted to reach the last page of Wishbone. Enchanting and thought-provoking, Laia Jufresa’s unforgettable novel presents vivid portrayals of complicated characters confronting artistic aspirations, emotional entanglements, and loss. The color-rich world that Jufresa presents spans decades and continents and is so exquisitely written and stylishly plotted that it absolutely seduced me. I cannot wait to read it again and to ponder its meanings with fellow readers. I doubt there could be a better novel published in English in 2026.

Lori Feathers, writer and bookseller, Interabang Books (Dallas)