"This barrio angel teaches us how to see behind the appearance of things and how to embrace reality with all the senses." —Isabel Allende"Laura Restrepo breathes life into a singular amalgam of journalistic investigation and literary creation. Her fascination with popular culture and the play of her impeccable humor, of that biting but at the same time tender irony . . . infuses them with unmistakable reading pleasures."  —Gabriel García MárquezWinner of Mexico's Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and France's Prix France Culture, The Angel of Galilea introduces a refreshing new voice in Latin American literature to the English speaking audience.Mona is a jaded reporter for a Colombian tabloid sent on assignment to investigate an angel sighting in one of Bogotá's most devastated barrios, where she encounters a community torn apart by a passionate conflict over a beautiful man who walks the fine line between sanity and sainthood. For...

In Laura Restrepo's stunning novel, a feud between two Colombian drug families escalates into a bloody, high-stakes war that will leave no one in its path untouched. The Barragáns and the Monsalves are rival clans, each steeped in wealth and power, each subject only to laws of their own making. The similarities end there. While the Barragáns, headed by the brutal Nando, remain tied to the ancient traditions, the Monsalves grapple with whether or not to follow Mani, their charismatic and conflicted leader, into a modern age in which even fewer rules apply.  As both clans ponder the profits they might reap from an expanding global cocaine trade, Nando and Mani are faced with the consequences of their violent pasts—and forced, by their disillusioned women and the prices on their heads, to reckon with the possibility that nothing will be left once all their bullets have found their...

From one of the most accomplished writers to emerge from Latin America, No Place for Heroes is a darkly comic novel about a mother and son who return to Buenos Aires in search of her former lover, whom she met during Argentina’s Dirty War. During Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the late ’70s and early ’80s, Lorenza and Ramon, two passionate militants opposing Videla’s dictatorship, met and fell in love. Now, Lorenza and her son, Mateo, have come to Buenos Aires to find Ramon, Mateo’s father. Holed up in the same hotel room, mother and son share a common goal, yet are worlds apart on how they perceive it. For Lorenza, who came of age in the political ferment of the ’60s, it is intertwined with her past ideological and emotional anchors (or were they illusions?), while her postmodernist son, a child of the ’90s who couldn’t care less about politics or ideology, is looking for his actual father—not the idea of a father, but the Ramon of flesh and blood. Anything goes as this volatile pair battle it out: hilarious misunderstandings, unsettling cruelty, and even a temptation to murder. In the end, they begin to come to a more truthful understanding of each other and their human condition. No Place for Heroes is an addition to that long tradition of the eternal odd couple—in works ranging from Waiting for Godot to Kiss of the Spider Woman—waiting for their fortunes to change, written by one of the most talented and internationally celebrated authors at work today.From the Hardcover edition.From Publishers WeeklyFrom Restrepo (Delirium) comes a surprisingly plain-faced novel of parenthood set in the aftermath of the Argentine Dirty War. A journalist and one-time revolutionary, Lorenza is returning to Buenos Aires in the late 1990s with her teenage son, Mateo. Both are looking for RamoÌün Iribarren, a shadowy resistance leader and Mateo's father, with whom Lorenza spent the years of General Videla's junta distributing underground newspapers and frequenting apartment safe houses with toothpaste tubes filled with microfilm. As their search takes them deep into Argentina's recent past, Lorenza fills her impressionable son's head with tales of his troubled nativity, but Mateo has been brought up a member of a generation that may ultimately be beyond Lorenza's understanding. Restrepo is surefooted when it comes to depicting life during wartime, but the authenticity of that world is so starkly juxtaposed with her fumbling grasp of Mateo and youth culture that readers may wish that Restrepo had set the novel in the fascinating times that the characters seem largely content to relive. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review"Luminous and delightful"—San Francisco ChroniclePraise for Laura Restrepo’s *Delirium“Stunning, dense, complex, mind-blowing . . . This novel goes far above politics, right up into high art.” —Washington Post Book World“One of the finest novels written in recent memory.” —José Saramago“Masterful . . . Literary dynamite.” —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel “Every word in Delirium is perfectly chosen, painfully honest and brutally effective. Restrepo chooses her words like a poet, with infinite care.” —Philadelphia Inquirer“A disconcertingly lovely book, and its depiction of Colombian society at an awful moment in its history is sharp, vivid, utterly persuasive.” —New York Times Book ReviewFrom the Hardcover edition.

Once a month, the refinery workers of the Tropical Oil Company descend upon Tora, a city in the Colombian forest. They journey down from the mountains searching for earthly bliss and hoping to encounter Sayonara, the legendary Indian prostitute who rules their squalid paradise like a queen. Beautiful, exotic, and mysterious, Sayonara, the undisputed barrio angel, captivates whoever crosses her path. Then, one day, she violates the unwritten rules of her profession and falls in love with a man she can never have. Sayonara's unrequited passion has tragic consequences not only for her, but for all those whose lives ultimately depend on the Tropical Oil Company.A slyly humorous yet poignant love story, The Dark Bride lovingly recreates the lusty, heartrending world of Colombian prostitutes and the men of the oil fields who are entranced by them. Full of wit and intelligence, tragedy and compassion, The Dark Bride is luminous and unforgettable.

Base on true events, this brilliantly rendered novel recounts a dramatic tale of survival, and a woman’s determination to triumph over a harrowing fate.In 1908, Mexican captain Ramón Arnaud and his young bride, Alicia, set sail for Clipperton, a tiny Pacific atoll once dubbed "Isle of Passion" by Spanish explorers. Accompanied by eleven soldiers and their families, the captain is under orders to defend the isolated but strategically well situated island against an improbable French invasion. With its treacherous coral reef and stagnant lagoon, Clipperton is a dire, forbidding place for the new inhabitants. Rigid military order soon gives way to more informal island living, but under Ramón's guidance and inspired by Alicia's determination the group manages to create a viable community. There are a food store, pharmacy, lighthouse, even dinner parties. But then, amid political upheaval at home and the first rumblings of World War I, the Clipperton residents are forgotten. The supply ship slated to come every two months comes every third, then sixth, then not at all. Left to the mercies of nature and each other, they fall victim one by one to scurvy, hunger, despair, rivalry, lust and, ultimately, violence.Alicia, steadfast and resourceful, becomes a beacon of strength for the remaining castaways, whose collective survival will depend upon her courage and cunning. Drawing on historical records, archives and interviews, prize-winning novelist Laura Restrepo has reimagined the incredible true story of love and war, hardship and endurance, adventure and hope on the Isle of Passion. In prose that is lush, evocative and utterly beguiling, she brings to life a bizarre, moving episode in Mexican history and its extraordinary, unforgettable heroine.

"How can I tell him that he will never find her, after he has been searching for her all his life? If I could talk to him without breaking his heart, there is something I would tell him, in hopes it would stop his sleepless nights and wrongheaded search for a shadow. I would repeat this to him: 'Your Matilde Lina is in limbo, the dwelling place of those who are neither dead nor alive.' But that would be like severing the roots of the tree that supports him. Besides, why do it if he is not going to believe me."In the midst of war, the protagonists of A Tale of the Dispossessed are continuously searching: for a promised land, a destiny, the face of a woman who has disappeared -- searching for an impossible love and, conversely, for a love that is possible.A way station for refugees from violence is the setting for an intense love triangle in which an uprooted and wandering people lead the reader to experience the collective drama of forced relocation. A Tale of the Dispossessed speaks to us about the inexorable law that has led man, expelled from paradise since the days of Adam through to modern times, in his search for a way back home.From Publishers WeeklyThis slim volume offers Spanish and English versions of a novella about an encounter between strangers amid political chaos. Set in Tora, Colombia (where Restrepo's The Dark Bride was set), during a war, the work has a timeless, open quality that could situate it almost anywhere in time and place. Readers learn, through the perspective of a nameless narrator who works at a convent sheltering "the displaced," about the mysterious man Three Sevens, a new arrival at the refuge. Three Sevens is desperate to locate Matilde Lina, the laundress who rescued and raised him, from whom he was forcibly separated as a teenager during the Little War. The narrator, offering him room and board, falls in love with him, but must compete with his Oedipal attachment to Matilde Lina ("The world tastes of her," he says). Thus begins a spare but symbolic love story, a modern-day fairy tale with Freudian trimmings. Restrepo, a journalist, activist and academic, employs a singular, accessible voice that melds her political sensibilities with hints of magical realism. The author has been lauded by Gabriel García Márquez, and this book will fit snugly into the canon of modern Latin American literature. Even as it describes violence and fear, it shimmers with an almost innocent charm and a quiet lyricism. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the AuthorLaura Restrepo is the bestselling author of six novels, including The Dark Bride, A Tale of the Dispossessed, and Delirio, which received Spain's prestigious Alfaguara Prize. She lives in Colombia.Laura Restrepo fue profesora de literatura en la Universidad de Colombia, editora política en la revista Semana y miembro de la Comisión Nacional para la Paz. Ha escrito destacadas novelas tales como Leopardo al sol; Dulce Compañía, que obtuvo el premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en México y el premio France Culture en Francia; y Delirio, que obtuvo el premio Alfaguara. Actualmente vive en Bogotá, Colombia.