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A Novel
by Karina Pacheco Medrano
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.
"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." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A timely callback to Peruvian political bloodletting that blurs the line between victims and perpetrators." —Kirkus Reviews
"The Year of the Wind is as filled with beauty as it is with fury. It's an ode to friendship, home, family, but most of all to the pursuit of truth, no matter how hard it is to find or accept. An unflinching look at the horrors of the Shining Path years in Perú―but told with unmatched lyricism by a Latin American master at the height of her powers―this novel will grip you, hold you captive, and, when its mystery unravels, leave you amazed at the power of the human spirit." ―Alejandro Puyana, author of Freedom Is a Feast
"I loved The Year of the Wind by Karina Pacheco Medrano―a gorgeous, uncanny novel that haunted me in the best way. This is a book of memory and ghosts, a book of longing and magic, a book of history and a book of searching, a book that charts the life of Peru in the late twentieth century. It's also a book full of poems, visions, dreams, a book of investigation, a book that pulses with the ache of what's been lost and the fierce beauty of what remains. I don't know that I've ever read anything like it. This is a brilliant literary achievement." ―Stuart Nadler, author of Rooms for Vanishing
This information about The Year of the Wind was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Karina Pacheco Medrano is a Peruvian writer, anthropologist, and editor. She has a PhD in anthropology of the Americas and translates from French, English, and Portuguese to Spanish. She has published eleven books of fiction and four books of nonfiction.
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