Patricia Engel

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK AND INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A knockout of a novel…we predict [Infinite Country] will be viewed as one of 2021’s best.” —O, The Oprah Magazine Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 from Esquire, O, The Oprah Magazine, Elle, GMA, New York Post, Ms. Magazine, The Millions, Electric Literature, LitHub, AARP, Refinery29, BuzzFeed, Autostraddle, She Reads, Alma, and more. I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country. Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Colombia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the United States are waiting for her. If she misses her flight, she might also miss her chance to finally be reunited with her family in the north. How this family came to occupy two different countries, two different worlds, comes into focus like twists of a kaleidoscope. We see Talia’s parents, Mauro and Elena, fall in love in a market stall as teenagers against a backdrop of civil war and social unrest. We see them leave Bogotá with their firstborn, Karina, in pursuit of safety and opportunity in the United States on a temporary visa, and we see the births of two more children, Nando and Talia, on American soil. We witness the decisions and indecisions that lead to Mauro’s deportation and the family’s splintering—the costs they’ve all been living with ever since. Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engel, herself a dual citizen and the daughter of Colombian immigrants, gives voice to all five family members as they navigate the particulars of their respective circumstances. And all the while, the metronome ticks: Will Talia make it to Bogotá in time? And if she does, can she bring herself to trade the solid facts of her father and life in Colombia for the distant vision of her mother and siblings in America? Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality of the undocumented in America, Infinite Country is the story of two countries and one mixed-status family—for whom every triumph is stitched with regret, and every dream pursued bears the weight of a dream deferred.

A Novel

Infinite Country

Blaming herself for the horrifying crime that sent her brother to death row, Reina Castillo moves to a sleepy town in the Florida Keys, where a friendship with an exiled Cuban helps her understand her connection to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean.

The Veins of the Ocean

Stories

Faraway World

Follows a single narrator, Sabina, as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora and struggles to find her place within and beyond the net of her strong and protective, yet embattled, family. A first novel. Original.

Vida

Studying for a year in Paris away from her Colombian immigrant family's business in America, Lita del Cielo falls in love with the ailing son of a notorious right-wing politician and struggles to choose between staying with him in France or returning home to fulfill her family's dreams. A first novel by the author of the story collection, Vida.

It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

Sınırsız Ülke

Da una delle voci emergenti più interessanti dell’America contemporanea, la storia di una famiglia disposta a pagare un prezzo inimmaginabile per una vita migliore.

Dopo aver impulsivamente commesso un atto violento, Talia viene mandata in un riformatorio per adolescenti sulle montagne del dipartimento di Santander. Deve riuscire a tutti i costi a scappare da lì, per tornare a casa, a Bogotá, dove l’aspettano suo padre e un biglietto aereo per gli Stati Uniti. Se perde il volo, potrebbe anche perdere l’occasione di riunirsi finalmente con i suoi familiari. Come è arrivata la famiglia di Talia a dividersi in due? Vent’anni prima, gli adolescenti Mauro ed Elena si sono innamorati davanti a una bancarella del mercato in una Bogotá sull’orlo della guerra civile. Nella speranza di costruire una vita migliore, insieme alla loro primogenita Karina hanno lasciato il paese alla volta degli Stati Uniti, dove sono nati anche gli altri due figli, Nando e Talia, e dove hanno vissuto anni nell’ombra dell’irregolarità, da eterni esuli, rimpiangendo casa: «una nazione di amnesici, dove i narcotrafficanti diventano senatori e i senatori narcotrafficanti, gli assassini diventano presidenti e i presidenti assassini», ma pur sempre casa. Quando però Mauro, in seguito a una rissa, è stato deportato, tutto è andato in pezzi…
Vincitore del New American Voices Award 2021, finalista per l’Andrew Carnegie Medal 2022 e al primo posto nella classifica dei dieci libri dell’anno di «Entertainment Weekly», Paese infinito è un grido disperato che, oggi più che mai, risuonerà a lungo nella mente dei lettori.

«Patricia Engel è un portento. I suoi romanzi sono perle: grazie a un controllo squisito, evocano sentimenti profondi in maniera delicata. Paese infinito mi ha stesa, con la sua elegante e lucida decostruzione della nostalgia, della famiglia, dell’appartenenza e del sacrificio. Un libro che parla al presente con la devastante chiarezza di un oracolo».
Lauren Groff

«Una storia incredibilmente potente e illuminante su una famiglia colombiana fatta a pezzi dalla guerra e dalla migrazione».
Reese Witherspoon

«È difficile immaginare un lettore che non proverebbe piacere di fronte all’umorismo e all’intelligenza di Patricia Engel».
«The Economist»

Paese infinito

Dans ce premier roman unanimement salué par la critique américaine, Patricia Engel nous emmène sur les (hauts) talons de sa narratrice, Sabina, une jeune femme appartenant à la diaspora colombienne aux Etats-Unis, qui lutte pour façonner son identité dans et au-delà de sa sphère familiale. Progressant par tableaux, dans le New Jersey, à New York, à Miami, à Bogota, l'auteur manie aussi bien le détail que l'ellipse pour nous faire ressentir les secousses de cette transformation à la si lente violence que l'on appelle "devenir une femme".

Georgios Boudalis

Elissaveta Mousakova

One Philosophy - Many Interpretations

Book Conservation

Lita del Cielo has been granted one year to pursue her studies in Paris before returning to America to work in the family business. She moves into a gently crumbling Left Bank mansion known as the House of Stars, where the spirited but bedridden Countess Seraphine rents out rooms to young women visiting Paris to study, work, and, unofficially, to find love. Cautious and guarded, Lita keeps a cool distance from the other girls, who have come to the City of Light from all over the world, and who intimidate and fascinate her. Then one day Lita meets Cato, and the contours of her world shift. Set in a Paris of late-night bars, parties on the river, and vintage shops, Engel's debut novel marks the arrival of an original new voice.

Veins of the Ocean

Ganadora del premio Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Una profunda y cautivadora historia sobre vidas fracturadas que encuentran consuelo y redención en la naturaleza. La vida de Reina Castillo se desmorona con la condena a muerte de Carlito, su hermano. Deshecha, Reina decide mudarse a los Cayos de la Florida en busca de una nueva vida y allí conoce a Nesto, un cubano amante del mar, que le descubrirá el poder reparador de la naturaleza. Juntos emprenderán un viaje hacia sus orígenes, movidos por la necesidad de reinventarse desde su nuevo lugar en el mundo. Con una impresionante maestría narrativa, Patricia Engel consigue construir en esta novela a un personaje lúcido y conmovedor que nos inspira a repensar temas tan urgentes como el exilio, la reconciliación y las fronteras. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, A New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the International Latino Book Award “Lush and entrancing, steeped in love and sorrow, faith and myth. . . Patricia Engel is a gorgeous writer and I love the confidence of her prose. She knows the story she is telling, inside and out. She knows the story and its unfathomable depths and so that's how we experience reading this novel fully, deeply, like an ocean.”.- ―Roxane Gay for Book of the Month Club From award-winning author, Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean is the profound and riveting story of a young woman’s journey away from her family’s painful past towards redemption and a freer future. Set in the vibrant coastal communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, and Cartagena, The Veins of the Ocean is a wrenching exploration of what happens when life tests the limits of compassion, and a stunning and unforgettable portrait of fractured lives finding solace in the beauty and power of the natural world, and in one another. “[A] profound, daring venture . . . [Engel is] a unique and necessary voice for the Americas . . . the book is a great pleasure to read, even while it’s breaking your heart.” ―San Francisco Chronicle “Sumptuous . . . This is a writer who understands that exile can be as much an emotional state as a geographical one . . . to immerse oneself in Engel’s prose is to surrender to a seductive embrace, a hypnotic beauty that mingles submersion with submission.”―New York Times Book Review

Patricia Engel

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