Finding Fernanda

A compelling, dramatic narrative of how an American housewife discovered that the Guatemalan child she was about to adopt had been stolen from her birth mother, shedding light on the alarming and growing problem of international adoption fraud. Over the past five years, over 100,000 children were adopted into the United States, 20,000 of whom came from Guatemala. Finding Fernanda, a dramatic true story paired with investigative reporting, tells the side-by-side tales of an American housewife who adopts a two-year-old girl from Guatemala and the birth mother whose two children were stolen from her. Each woman gradually comes to realize her role in what was one of Guatemala's most profitable black-market industries: the buying and selling of children for international adoption. Finding Fernanda is an overdue, unprecedented look at adoption corruption--and a poignant, riveting human story about the power of hope, faith, and determination.

The dramatic story of how an American housewife discovered that the Guatemalan child she was about to adopt had been stolen from her birth mother Over the last decade, nearly 200,000 children have been adopted into the United States, 25,000 of whom came from Guatemala. Finding Fernanda, a dramatic true story paired with investigative reporting, tells the side-by-side tales of an American woman who adopted a two-year-old girl from Guatemala and the birth mother whose two children were stolen from her. Each woman gradually comes to realize her role in what was one of Guatemala’s most profitable black-market industries: the buying and selling of children for international adoption. Finding Fernanda is an overdue, unprecedented look at adoption corruption—and a poignant, riveting human story about the power of hope, faith, and determination.

The English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished young Mexican writers Winner of the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute's Tanslation Prize Longlisted for the National Book Award Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Winner of the Internationaler Literaturpreis New York Public Library Best Books of 2020 Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2020 The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters—inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable—forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village. Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it.

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light

This Ecuadorian short story collection explores domestic horrors and everyday violence, a "grotesque, unflinching" portrait of twenty-first-century Latin America (Publishers Weekly). “Ampuero’s literary voice is tough and beautiful at once: her stories are exquisite and dangerous objects.” —Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero. In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas. Heralding a brutal and singular new voice, Cockfight explores the power of the home to both create and destroy those within it.

In a rundown apartment building, in an unnamed city in Uruguay, a father and daughter close themselves off from the world. "The world is this house," says Clara, and the rooftop becomes their last recess of freedom. A pet canary is their only witness. As Clara’s connection to the outside is stripped away—the neighbor who stops coming by, the lover whose existence is only known by a pregnancy—desperation and paranoia take hold. It's a stifling embrace, and we are there with her, our narrator, dreading what we know the future holds.

The End centers on five friends in Rio de Janeiro who, nearing the end of their lives, are left with memories—of parties, marriages, divorces, fixations, inhibitions, bad decisions—and the physical indignities of aging. Alvaro lives alone and spends his time going from doctor to doctor and bemoaning the evils of his ex-wife. Silvio is a junkie who can’t give up the excesses of sex and drugs even in his old age. Ribeiro is an athletic beach bum enjoying a prolonged sex life thanks to Viagra. Neto is the square member of the group, a faithful husband until his last days. And Ciro is the Don Juan envied by all—but the first to die, struck down by cancer. For all of them, successful careers, personal revelations, and Zen serenity are out of the question, blocked by a seemingly insurmountable wall of frustrations. Orbiting around them are a priest questioning his vocation and a cast of complicated women, neglected and embattled by these self-involved men. Edgy and wise, this tragicomic debut delves into taboo subjects—death, infidelity, impotence, the difficulties of marriage—with unsentimental honesty, and brings Rio and these characters to life in full color.

Out of the Cage opens in 1956, in Argentina, with the freakish death of Aurora Berro, and descends into a dark philosophical exploration of humanity and mortality. In the midst of her family’s celebration of a national holiday, an LP, careening through the air like a “demented boomerang,” severs her jugular. Her family— an agglomeration of perversions, deformities, and obsessions—seems at first not to notice, singing on. Aurora is left behind in a voyeuristic limbo as an omniscient first-person narrator, to observe the depravity of her family and reflect on the farce of her life and human existence. Fernanda García Lao has been called “the strangest writer of Argentine literature,” and in Out of the Cage, she lives up to that distinction. The book is saturated in strangeness, a blend of formal experimentation, eroticism, grotesque theatricality, and dark humor that evokes the absurdist fictions of Witold Gombrowicz and the style of Silvina Ocampo. The result is a macabre and fantastic vaudeville, a tragicomedy, a kind of Dadaist opus against ideas of eternal beauty and fixed identity, against absolute concepts and universality.

The poignant saga of Guatemala's adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession. In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption--but in 1986 a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat's mother at all, but a jaladora--a baby broker. Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala's civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. Amid the US-backed army's genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. During the war's second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a "sender" state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation. Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.