Free Radicals

A delightful coming of age story for both the protagonist and an entire country, Free Radicals is the story of a girl who finds herself watching her mother run off with her lover on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The aftermath makes for the most incredible novel: a saga that reconstructs more than six decades in the history of Mexico, the United States, and the world, spanning at least four generations. Rosa Beltrán's fascinating journey recreates events that changed history forever: the expansion of communism in Latin America, the student movements of the 1960s, the Moon landing, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, the dramatic rise of migration, drug trafficking, the social media explosion, and the growth of the middle class. Told in first person, from the retrospective view of the protagonist, the book sheds light on things that once went unnamed, like "domestic violence" or "femicide." This book is a work of art, a document, a diary, a memoir for both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking communities - and, for everyone who wants to make sense of what we are experiencing, where we come from, what our parents have been through, and how our continent has transformed.