Los espantos de mamá

Jobless and drinking, a man from Aranjuez, the Medellín neighbourhood beside an abandoned asylum, is taken on at the city's General Cemetery. Slowly he is drawn into horror stories that never resolve, and comes to search for the bodies of people killed in the so-called false positives. He brings it all home to his mother, over dinner and in the notebook sessions where the two of them review the neighbourhood's news. A Dantesque descent among ghosts and wailing women, the book spans a century of Colombian bloodshed, from the banana massacre of 1928 to contract killers and gang wars, and speaks for the disappeared and the forgotten.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

292 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Politics (assigned by AI)

Set in

Colombia

First published

2025 by Random House

Author's age

47 when first published

ISBN

9786287811157 (original)