5 Out of 5 Stars
Infinite Country by Patricia Engel is about a couple who flee to America in hopes of finding work and a safer place for their young family. Unfortunately, the family is separated. The mother and two children stay in America. And the father and one child return to Columbia.
Throughout the novel, various family members narrate. Yet, the main narrator is the youngest child in Columbia, trying to make her way to America. This novel is a heartbreaking tale of being separated from those you love; by years, thousands of miles, and a vast canyon of cultures in which they dwell.
We firmly believe that if people tried to understand what life is like for others, the world would be better. Many social troubles exist because people don’t put themselves into other’s shoes. One of the many reasons we love reading is because it allows us to step into the lives of people we wouldn’t otherwise know about and learn what it is to BE them, if only in our minds.
Show us a voracious reader, and we’ll show you someone with endless amounts of empathy.
Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Colombia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the United States are waiting for her. If she misses her flight, she might also miss her chance to finally be reunited with her family in the north.
How this family came to occupy two different countries, two different worlds, comes into focus like twists of a kaleidoscope. Talia’s parents fall in love in a market stall as teenagers against a backdrop of civil war and social unrest. Then they leave Columbia with their first child for the safety of America. After two more children born on American soil, a series of decisions and indecisions leads to the family splintering and at a great cost to all their lives since.
Infinite Country is the story of two countries and one mixed-status family. A family for whom every triumph is stitched with regret. And every dream pursued bears the weight of a dream deferred.
Patricia Engel is the author of Infinite Country, a New York Times Bestseller, Reese’s Book Club pick, Esquire Book Club and Book of the Month Club pick, Indie Next pick, Amazon Best Book of the Month, and more.
Her other books include The Veins of the Ocean, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, which won the International Latino Book Award, and of Vida, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award and the Young Lions Fiction Award; winner of a Florida Book Award, International Latino Book Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, longlisted for the Story Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. For Vida, Patricia was the first woman to be awarded Colombia’s national prize in literature, the 2017 Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana.
The novel was published on March 2, 2021.
The print book has 205 pages.
No, not yet at least.
The cover image of this feature is by Jorge Gardner on Unsplash
Do you enjoy great fiction about people searching for a better life?
Check out another story we recently reviewed, The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah.
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