IN THE WAKING HOURS

Irene, who is looking after her new born twins as her marriage falls apart, revisits a troubled past in which the memories of her sick brother mix with the dangerous activities of armed groups operating in Columbia’s Caribbean region and remembers a suffocating home life where her closest relationship was with Luzmila, the maid who had worked for her family for a long time. As she revisits her teenage years in a Caribbean world of discrimination and political violence where class is in evidence everywhere, she looks for clues that will help her understand her current malaise.The narration moves between bodies of water where violence erupts in the form of the ‘miraculous fishing’ of the 1990s, evocations of the Magdalena river which crosses the whole of Colombia, from the South to the Northern shores of the Caribbean Sea, of the streams that take over the city, of the nearby swamps, and more poetic forms of water that wash away the weight of family life and the memories of Irene’s childhood. Questioning Colombian society and exposing the limits of normative femininity, VIGILIA is a novel full of women who dream of escaping.