The Year of the Wind
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A lyrical novel depicting the devastating effects of political violence in Peru on three women’s lives
Nina, a Peruvian writer in Spain on the eve of the pandemic, is pulled back into her nation’s fraught history after a fleeting encounter with a woman who is a doppelgänger of Bárbara, a cousin lost to time. The games, the candor, and the secrets of her youth come alive again, but these memories are tinged with disquiet, and what unfolds takes Nina back to a village nestled in the Andes where she must confront the terrors that stalked Peru in the early 1980s. As she travels from Cusco to Apurimac to uncover Bárbara’s fate, Nina begins to weave a new cloth of memory. She learns more about Bárbara’s political radicalization and involvement with the Shining Path, the Maoist terrorist group that instigated a bloody period of political violence in which tens of thousands of mostly indigenous Peruvians disappeared or were killed.
In her first novel to be translated into English, Karina Pacheco Medrano explores how war transforms family stories and complicates the distinction between prey and hunter. Part bildungsroman, part detective novel, The Year of the Wind records a significant chapter in Peruvian history rarely considered in the literature of political violence, exploring the anonymous stories marked by horror, loss, bewilderment, and, in some cases, redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pacheco Medrano dazzles in her English-language debut, the surreal story of a 50-something Peruvian writer reckoning with her cousin's disappearance during the government's conflict with a Maoist insurgency in the 1980s. Soon after moving to Madrid in January 2020, Nina is shocked to encounter a woman who's the spitting image of her cousin, Bárbara Varas, whom she hasn't seen in 40 years. The woman introduces herself as Berna and declares that Bárbara is dead without offering any explanation as to how she knows this. Afterward, Nina fixates on the past, recalling how when she was 11 in 1980, 17-year-old Bárbara moved in with Nina's family to attend university. Nina also remembers the closely guarded letters Bárbara received from a mysterious suitor before leaving in 1982 for a rural teaching post in Hatun Umara. As Nina dives down an online rabbit hole trying to identify the suitor, she reflects on how Bárbara became radicalized at school and suspects she might have joined the far-left guerilla group Shining Path. Pacheco Medrano effectively suffuses her detective plot with a polyphonic mix of voices, including Bárbara's and her grandmother's. After Nina travels back to Peru in the narrative's second half, a series of harrowing revelations explain the encounter in Madrid. It's a powerful meditation on the irrevocable toll of political violence.
