In early-20th-century El Salvador, Graciela is raised in an Indigenous community at the foot of a volcano, her childhood bathed in the rhythms of the land and the whispered stories of ancestral women. Her older sister Consuelo—taken from the home she never remembers—lives a world apart, groomed by privilege and stripped of the soil that formed her roots.

As the brutal regime of El Gran Pendejo tightens its grip, both sisters become pawns in a violent game of power, identity and myth. When genocide strikes, their lives unravel in ways neither expected: each flees their homeland, believing the other dead, carrying with them the ghosts of friends murdered and stories buried by time. The spirits of Lourdes, María, Cora and Lucía narrate the sisters’ journeys—a haunting chorus that bridges the living and the dead, the personal and the political.

From volcanic slopes to exile across continents, The Volcano Daughters is an epic of survival, sisterhood, and the indelible marks of colonial violence. With sweeping imagination and searing lyricism, Balibrera gives voice to those who were erased and reveals how memory, place and voice become acts of resistance.