Where There Was Fire
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- 5,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Where there was fire, ashes remain . . .
Costa Rica, 1968.
A deadly fire rips through the American Fruit Company's most lucrative banana plantation, destroying all evidence of a massive cover-up.
That same night, Teresa Cepeda Valverde’s mother is murdered, and her husband vanishes into the darkness.
Decades later, as a hurricane twists through the streets of Barrio Ávila, Teresa’s estranged daughter Lyra begins to piece together the mysteries lost in the blaze. In her desire to find the truth of her own family's rupture, she uncovers a web of devastating betrayals, stoked by machismo, jealousy and greed.
Where There Was Fire brims with ancestral spirits, omens and the forces of nature. John Manuel Arias’s extraordinary debut novel weaves a brilliant tapestry of love – lost and found again – and, ultimately, redemption.
‘A haunting, operatic saga of family, history and place. . . An utterly original, unforgettable tale of family that will sear a place in the reader's soul’ - Xochitl Gonzalez, bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming
‘An ambitious debut novel . . . The combination of legend and dream sequences, characters spellbound by hallucinations, toxic odours and huge cane toads, adds to the sense of a society ill at ease with nature and itself’ - Times Literary Supplement
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Arias's lush and ambitious debut, the women of a Costa Rican family wrestle with their resentments and secrets in the long shadow of a banana plantation. On a hot night in 1968, two catastrophic events alter the lives and fortunes of the Sánchez Cepeda household: José María murders his mother-in-law in front of his wife, Teresa, and one of his daughters, and the American Fruit Company's largest plantation burns to the ground. In 1995, the surviving family members are still trying to make sense of what happened. Teresa, now about to turn 60, has continued to live in the same house in Barrio Ávila, with only her mother's ghost for company. A dire medical diagnosis forces her estranged daughter, Lyra, to contemplate allowing Teresa to meet her grandson, Gabriel. Hanging over the familial tension is the legacy of U.S. agricultural exploitation, particularly the use of toxic pesticides on American Fruit Company crops. Arias shows a knack for arresting images ("He stumbled out into a mud-dirt road and swayed in the imaginary breeze only drunken men feel") as he winds back and forth through time. The novel is strongest capturing the complications of love and the parental struggle not to inflict the traumas they inherited on their children. It's a rewarding outing from an exciting new voice with a prowess for lyricism.
