Infinite Country
A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
"A knockout of a novel...we predict [Infinite Country] will be viewed as one of 2021's best." --O, The Oprah Magazine
‘A poignant and beautifully written tale’ – Financial Times
A Grazia 'Best Book of 2021'
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.
"An exquisitely told story of family, war, and migration, this is a novel our increasingly divided country wants and needs to read." --R.O. Kwon, Electric Literature
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Woven into Patricia Engel’s masterful fourth novel are the stories of five members of the same family. Talia is prepared to tie up a nun, abscond from her prison school and hitchhike back to Bogotá in order not to miss her flight to the United States. The teenager is due to be reunited with her mother and two siblings for the first time since she was sent to Colombia as a baby, to be looked after by her grandmother. But her mother and sister, both ‘undocumented’, and her brother, born in the US, are to an extent strangers—and she is torn about leaving her father, himself deported back to Colombia many years ago. Through them Engel, a Colombian American who in 2017 became the first woman to receive Colombia’s national prize in literature, interrogates the experience of migration: its losses and gains, and the vulnerabilities of being undocumented. Infinite Country is both gripping and affecting—a book about family, impossible choices, and the people, places and myths that make us feel we belong.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Engel (The Veins of the Ocean) delivers an outstanding novel of migration and the Colombian diasporae. Talia breaks out of a reformatory for girls in Colombia with a single purpose: to reunite with her family in the U.S. Her parents, Elena and Mauro, fell in love as teenagers and had a child before fleeing from the violence, poverty, and uncertainty of Bogot and moving to Houston, where "their ears took in English, English, all the time English, and if they heard Spanish, it was with no accent like their own." After overstaying their visas, they have two more kids including Talia, the youngest, and move to various cities. But the family is separated when Mauro is deported for driving without a license. The narrative moves between past and present to chronicle Talia's travails first sent back to Colombia to live with her grandmother as a young girl, and later hitchhiking to Bogot to meet Mauro and the lives of Elena and Mauro, revealing the struggles of undocumented migrants and exploring "how people who do horrible things can be victims, and how victims can be people who do horrible things." Engel's sharp, unflinching narrative teems with insight and dazzles with a confident, slyly sophisticated structure. This is an impressive achievement.