-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
A Novel
by Mario Alberto Zambrano
In Lotería, the spellbinding literary debut by Mario Alberto Zambrano, a young girl tells the story of her family's tragic demise using a deck of cards of the eponymous Latin American game of chance.
With her older sister Estrella in the ICU and her father in jail, eleven-year-old Luz Castillo has been taken into the custody of the state. Alone in her room, she retreats behind a wall of silence, writing in her journal and shuffling through a deck of lotería cards. Each of the cards' colorful images - mermaids, bottles, spiders, death, and stars - sparks a random memory.
Pieced together, these snapshots bring into focus the joy and pain of the young girl's life, and the events that led to her present situation. But just as the story becomes clear, a breathtaking twist changes everything.
Beautiful full-color images of lotería cards are featured throughout this intricate and haunting novel.
"Starred Review. An intriguing debut and an elegiac, miniature entry in the literature of Latin American diaspora that will break your heart." - Publishers Weekly
"A contemplative yet discordant collection of stories about where life's scars originate. " - Kirkus Reviews
"Loteria, charms on every page, despite heartache, love and loss...The beauty and joy of her voice overcomes the hardships of her life, and by the end we have fallen in love. Bravo to a marvelous debut!" - Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli
"Mario Alberto Zambrano's Loteria is a tender, beautifully written story. In every line, Zambrano finds the happy and sad music of childhood. It is an entrancing work." - Lynne Tillman, author of Someday This Will Be Funny
This information about Loteria was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
