"Debt is a novel inhabited by women who embrace painting as a way of being in the world. Lidia, at first, understands that all roads lead her to leaving Rome. But upon arriving in Oaxaca, she encounters a painful reality. She becomes another name, another figure, another piece added to the catalog of absences. Each stroke and each silence reveals what fate is determined to conceal."
— Elmer Mendoza

"This novel is a swift spiral where inheritance is debt, and debt is all-encompassing. The story unfolds as if we were discovering the layers of a painting under X-rays: old wounds, generational trauma, sketches, longings, feelings. The protagonist views art history as a murky mirror of her life and delves into a murky world as if painting a living picture. Karina Sosa is a master at creating complex narratives with very few brushstrokes."
— Laia Jufresa

★ A powerful new voice from Mexico – award-winning female author
Karina Sosa Castañeda, winner of the Amazon Mexico First Novel Award, weaves together the European art world and the brutal realities of Oaxaca. This is a novel about the many debts women carry: family inheritance, emotional wounds, class and gender inequalities. At its heart, it is a journey of escape, brokenness, and rebuilding oneself from the ground up.

★ Debt in all its forms – inheritance, trauma, gender, and survival
The novel explores debt not just as money owed, but as something inherited: generational trauma, emotional neglect, and the weight of being born a woman in an unequal world. It asks a profound question: Can we ever truly free ourselves from what we are born with? And is redemption found in letting go of everything we've inherited, and learning to love the world – and ourselves – again?

★ Two worlds of women, one story
The novel contrasts two groups of women: one, in Europe's art circles, uses painting as a shield from reality; the other, in the valleys of Oaxaca, is crushed by a predatory lending system that forces them to pay with their lives. The protagonist Lidia moves between both worlds – privileged by her family legacy, yet equally scarred by the shared wounds of womanhood. The novel never looks down on either side. Instead, it links personal pain with the larger violence women face in society, making a deeply private story resonate far beyond itself.

"I am the sediment of a friendship that turned into dust, a debtor trying to survive in the shadows of two women who decided that art was the only elegant way to ignore reality."

Trapped in a labyrinth of heartbreak and humiliation following her breakup with Ettore—a painter who doesn't value her—and her dangerous affair with Giorgio Casamonica, Lidia Alves flees Rome seeking to erase her identity. However, in the Oaxacan valleys that shelter her, the luxury of her sorrow crashes against the brutal reality of women oppressed by a system of predatory loans, women who ultimately pay with their lives what money cannot buy.

In this dazzling novel, Karina Sosa Castañeda explores in depth the weight of family legacy in women's lives. Her "debt," embodied in the greatness of her great-grandmother Emily von Hohenstein (a close friend of Peggy Guggenheim), has allowed Lidia to live with a material ease that contrasts sharply with her emotional abandonment. Amidst multisensory descriptions of the work of painters such as Caravaggio, Veronese, Klein, and Toledo, this narrative offers the painful path to redemption of a woman willing to abandon everything in order to love everything: the dawn, the wind, food, lovers, and, finally, to love herself.