Marcella Marx, with her manuscript-in-progress, Invisible Animals, is a 2025 New Voices writer.

About Invisible Animals: Invisible Animals follows the intertwined lives of four women — Maria, Joana, Ruth, and Tereza — in the fictional land of Pindorama. Set against a backdrop of patriarchy and social inequality, the novel examines invisibility, servitude, and the struggle for autonomy across generations, blending extraordinary elements with everyday reality to explore intersections of gender, class, and race.

Maria, descended from shipwreck survivors, leaves her rural home as a teenager to work as a live-in maid in Joana’s household. Illiterate and isolated, she is pressured to abandon her ancestral Candomblé faith for Evangelical Christianity. Though religion provides belonging, it also deepens her subjugation — until a decisive moment forces her to confront her desire for self-determination.

Joana, raised by Maria, becomes a social media influencer who secretly yearns to write. Torn between authenticity and performance, she faces new conflict when she falls in love with a woman, straining her public identity and her relationship with her mother, Tereza.

Ruth flees rural poverty at fourteen and finds work as a maid in Tereza’s home. After enduring rape and losing her child to adoption, she returns home pregnant again, questioning whether she can escape cycles of trauma.

Tereza, a nurse turned consultant for media productions, juggles financial success with moral compromise. A single mother haunted by guilt, she turns to systemic therapy to uncover inherited patterns of pain while struggling to accept Joana’s queerness and her own complicity in the structures she rejects.

Together, their stories reveal how silence, resilience, and resistance are passed down—and how breaking cycles of invisibility requires both reckoning and courage.

About Marcella: Marcella Marx is a Brazilian-born writer and educator. A fellow of the London Library Emerging Writers Programme, she holds an MFA from Birkbeck, where she studied under Dame Marina Warner. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate Prize, longlisted for the Berlin Writing Prize, and named a finalist for the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Prize. Her work is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Queer Life, Queer Love III, and the London Library Anthology. She is currently working on her second novel.