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A Novel
by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
A "dazzling, cinematic, intimate, lyrical" (Roxane Gay) epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West, from the author of the National Book Award finalist Sabrina & Corina.
There is one every generation, a seer who keeps the stories.
Luz "Little Light" Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors' origins, how her family flourished, and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion.
Written in Kali Fajardo-Anstine's singular voice, the wildly entertaining and complex lives of the Lopez family fill the pages of this multigenerational western saga. Woman of Light is a transfixing novel about survival, family secrets, and love—filled with an unforgettable cast of characters, all of whom are just as special, memorable, and complicated as our beloved heroine, Luz.
"Fajardo-Anstine brings to life in sensory-rich details ... a lush, immersive historical novel." —Kirkus Reviews
"Impossible to put down ... Fajardo-Anstine's compelling writing paints a convincing portrait of a city in flux, haunted by white violence, and portrays a complex female friendship, a vivid love story (or three), and a story of family and memory in the American West." —Booklist
"An intimate and intensely moving story. Fajardo-Anstine's lyrical, unpretentious prose renders the generations of women of this story in all of their complexity, offering a nuanced perspective on how the past can inform the future ... Fajardo-Anstine ... is a formidable, necessary voice in fiction." —Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Malibu Rising
"This novel is indelible, and shines its big light on the Lopez family so brightly that I could draw a map of their breath... . An absolutely glorious novel." —Emma Straub, author of All Adults Here
This information about Woman of Light 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.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the author of Sabrina & Corina, a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, The Story Prize, and winner of an American Book Award. She is the 2021 recipient of the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been honored with the Denver Mayor's Global Impact Award for Excellence in Arts & Culture and the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award for Fiction. She has written for The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, ELLE, The American Scholar, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and Tin House. Fajardo-Anstine holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming and has lived across the country, from Durango, Colorado, to Key West, Florida. She is the 2022–2023 Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University. She is from Denver, Colorado.
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