Guayacanal

What begins as a road trip soon turns into a journey back through the generations. Heading for Manzanares, the narrator, William, retraces the route his great-grandparents took from Antioquia more than a century before, and recalls Guayacanal, the family farm, and Padua in Tolima, where he was a boy. Grandparents, uncles, cousins and old storytellers, living and dead, lend him their memories as the book moves freely between the Conquest, the settling of the mountains in the nineteenth century, and seventy years of uneasy peace before partisan killings swept the region in the middle of the twentieth century. Music, joy and everyday life sit beside death threats, murders and massacres, in an attempt to save a vanished Colombia from oblivion.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Family, Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

Colombia

First published

2019 by Literatura Random House

Author's age

65 when first published

ISBN

9789585458857 (original)