Vida

Fresh, accomplished, and fearless, Vida marks the debut of Patricia Engel, a young author of immense talent and promise. Vida follows a single narrator, Sabina, as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora and stru... Read more

Fresh, accomplished, and fearless, Vida marks the debut of Patricia Engel, a young author of immense talent and promise. Vida follows a single narrator, Sabina, as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora and struggles to find her place within and beyond the net of her strong, protective, but embattled family.In ''Lucho,'' Sabina''s family-already ''foreigners in a town of blancos''-is shunned by the community when a relative commits an unspeakable act of violence, but she is in turn befriended by the town bad boy who has a secret of his own; in ''Desaliento,'' Sabina surrounds herself with other young drifters who spend their time looking for love and then fleeing from it-until reality catches up with one of them; and in ''Vida,'' the urgency of Sabina''s self-imposed exile in Miami fades when she meets an enigmatic Colombian woman with a tragic past.Patricia Engel maps landscapes both actual and interior in this stunning debut, and the constant throughout is Sabina-serious, witty, alternately cautious and reckless, open to transformation yet skeptical of its lasting power. Infused by a hard-won, edgy wisdom, Vida introduces a sensational new literary voice. Less