98 Seconds Without Shade

Genoveva is sixteen. She goes to a Catholic girls’ school and lives, as she puts it, in the Ass End of the World – a remote town in deep Latin America, where modernization arrives hand-in-hand with drug trafficking. Between a mother lost in delusional dreams and a father clinging to the ruins of long-faded Trotskyism, Genoveva narrates her world with a voice that’s raw, contradictory, fearless, and startlingly innocent.She doesn’t like what she sees. She doesn’t like what she touches. She doesn’t like the life she has – or the one that awaits her. But from that discomfort emerges a fierce spiritual longing, a desperate urge to believe in something – anything – that might offer an escape.98 Seconds Without Shade is a luminous, unsettling coming-of-age novel about faith, rebellion, and the unbearable solitude of adolescence. Through Genoveva’s eyes, we glimpse a broken world where horror and hope are indistinguishable – and survival may lie in surrendering to either.