From a new literary star comes a beautifully crafted story about a group of women in a Colombian village who find their lives changed while their husbands and sons are away fighting a deadly civil war. The women of Mariquita -- made widows when their men are swept away by the army or rebel forces -- learn hard lessons about love and survival. Forced to grow in extraordinary ways, they challenge the tenets of male-dominated society, discover power with all its pitfalls and strive to create an entirely new social order, an all-female utopia. Their narrative is punctuated by short vignettes of the individual travails of the men and boys -- left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, national army officers and civilians -- caught amidst these hellish forces. For the first 18 years of his life, the author, James Canon, lived in his native Colombia and this pitch-perfect book -- darkly comedic, its characters brilliantly etched -- is a mighty achievement, an entirely fresh, startling perspective to Colombia's catastrophe where the longest and bloodiest civil war in this hemisphere has raged for 40 years.
- ISBN10 0061140392
- ISBN13 9780061140396
- Publish Date 26 December 2007 (first published 2 January 2007)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint HarperCollins Publishers
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 352
- Language English