Overview

Nina, a Peruvian writer in Spain on the eve of the pandemic, is pulled back into her nation's fraught history after a fleeting encounter with a woman who is a doppelgänger of Bárbara, a cousin lost to time. The games, the candor, and the secrets of her youth come alive again, but these memories are tinged with disquiet, and what unfolds takes Nina back to a village nestled in the Andes where she must confront the terrors that stalked Peru in the early 1980s. As she travels from Cusco to Apurimac to uncover Bárbara's fate, Nina begins to weave a new cloth of memory. She learns more about Bárbara's political radicalization and involvement with the Shining Path, the Maoist terrorist group that instigated a bloody period of political violence in which tens of thousands of mostly indigenous Peruvians disappeared or were killed. In her first novel to be translated into English, Karina Pacheco Medrano explores how war transforms family stories and complicates the distinction between prey and hunter. Part bildungsroman, part detective novel, The Year of the Wind records a significant chapter in Peruvian history rarely considered in the literature of political violence, exploring the anonymous stories marked by horror, loss, bewilderment, and, in some cases, redemption.

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9781644453650

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Reviews

""Karina Pacheco Medrano's The Year of the Wind is an exquisitely textured immersion in recent Peruvian history, told through the lens of a female narrator who goes in search of answers to the disappearance of her beloved muse-cousin and the painful secrets a family, community, and country have inured in silence. We, readers, live and breathe that history of a bloody war between government forces and the Shining Path guerilla movement that left over 70,000 dead, through intriguing characters, encounters, stories that bring those facts to life. The Year of the Wind is complex interweave, at once a bildungsroman with a twist (how do children come of age in a world of bloodshed and terror?), a detective story, exhuming layer upon layer of the past, as well as a pandemic story in which the devastations of a rising global death toll echo a nation's and a family's past. The narrator refuses the easy drug of historical amnesia and instead relentlessly pursues the elusive truth of what happened. The world is full of ghosts. There is no exorcism unless we dare to stand at the edge of the abyss and listen. At the end of the novel, our narrator calls out her cri de coeur to this beloved figure from the past: 'How could you end up this way?' A cry that echoes down the generations to this day. In her bold, brave, and beautiful book, Karina Pacheco Medrano provides us with no answers but something larger. To quote her own words, rendered in clear and lyrical translation by Mara Faye Lethem: 'Hunting time had ended. . . . She placed her hands on its wound. She sang.' Pacheco Medrano has placed her writing hands on that wound and her novel sings.""--Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies ""The Year of the Wind is as filled with beauty as it is with fury. It's an ode to friendship, home, family, but most of all to the pursuit of truth, no matter how hard it is to find or accept. An unflinching look at the horrors of the Shining Path years in Perú--but told with unmatched lyricism by a Latin American master at the height of her powers--this novel will grip you, hold you captive, and, when its mystery unravels, leave you amazed at the power of the human spirit.""--Alejandro Puyana, author of Freedom Is a Feast ""I loved The Year of the Wind by Karina Pacheco Medrano--a gorgeous, uncanny novel that haunted me in the best way. This is a book of memory and ghosts, a book of longing and magic, a book of history and a book of searching, a book that charts the life of Peru in the late twentieth century. It's also a book full of poems, visions, dreams, a book of investigation, a book that pulses with the ache of what's been lost and the fierce beauty of what remains. I don't know that I've ever read anything like it. This is a brilliant literary achievement.""--Stuart Nadler, author of Rooms for Vanishing

""Pacheco Medrano dazzles in her English-language debut. . . . It's a powerful meditation on the irrevocable toll of political violence.""--Publishers Weekly, starred review ""[An] ambitious, intelligent novel. . . . A timely callback to Peruvian political bloodletting that blurs the line between victims and perpetrators.""--Kirkus Reviews ""Karina Pacheco Medrano's The Year of the Wind is an exquisitely textured immersion in recent Peruvian history, told through the lens of a female narrator who goes in search of answers to the disappearance of her beloved muse-cousin and the painful secrets a family, community, and country have inured in silence. We, readers, live and breathe that history of a bloody war between government forces and the Shining Path guerilla movement that left over 70,000 dead, through intriguing characters, encounters, stories that bring those facts to life. The Year of the Wind is complex interweave, at once a bildungsroman with a twist (how do children come of age in a world of bloodshed and terror?), a detective story, exhuming layer upon layer of the past, as well as a pandemic story in which the devastations of a rising global death toll echo a nation's and a family's past. The narrator refuses the easy drug of historical amnesia and instead relentlessly pursues the elusive truth of what happened. The world is full of ghosts. There is no exorcism unless we dare to stand at the edge of the abyss and listen. At the end of the novel, our narrator calls out her cri de coeur to this beloved figure from the past: 'How could you end up this way?' A cry that echoes down the generations to this day. In her bold, brave, and beautiful book, Karina Pacheco Medrano provides us with no answers but something larger. To quote her own words, rendered in clear and lyrical translation by Mara Faye Lethem: 'Hunting time had ended. . . . She placed her hands on its wound. She sang.' Pacheco Medrano has placed her writing hands on that wound and her novel sings.""--Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies ""The Year of the Wind is as filled with beauty as it is with fury. It's an ode to friendship, home, family, but most of all to the pursuit of truth, no matter how hard it is to find or accept. An unflinching look at the horrors of the Shining Path years in Perú--but told with unmatched lyricism by a Latin American master at the height of her powers--this novel will grip you, hold you captive, and, when its mystery unravels, leave you amazed at the power of the human spirit.""--Alejandro Puyana, author of Freedom Is a Feast ""I loved The Year of the Wind by Karina Pacheco Medrano--a gorgeous, uncanny novel that haunted me in the best way. This is a book of memory and ghosts, a book of longing and magic, a book of history and a book of searching, a book that charts the life of Peru in the late twentieth century. It's also a book full of poems, visions, dreams, a book of investigation, a book that pulses with the ache of what's been lost and the fierce beauty of what remains. I don't know that I've ever read anything like it. This is a brilliant literary achievement.""--Stuart Nadler, author of Rooms for Vanishing

""Pacheco Medrano dazzles in her English-language debut. . . . It's a powerful meditation on the irrevocable toll of political violence.""--Publishers Weekly, starred review ""Pacheco Medrano dazzles in her English-language debut, the surreal story of a 50-something Peruvian writer reckoning with her cousin's disappearance during the government's conflict with a Maoist insurgency in the 1980s.""--The Millions' ""Great Fall 2025 Preview"" ""[An] ambitious, intelligent novel. . . . A timely callback to Peruvian political bloodletting that blurs the line between victims and perpetrators.""--Kirkus Reviews ""Karina Pacheco Medrano's The Year of the Wind is an exquisitely textured immersion in recent Peruvian history, told through the lens of a female narrator who goes in search of answers to the disappearance of her beloved muse-cousin and the painful secrets a family, community, and country have inured in silence. We, readers, live and breathe that history of a bloody war between government forces and the Shining Path guerilla movement that left over 70,000 dead, through intriguing characters, encounters, stories that bring those facts to life. The Year of the Wind is complex interweave, at once a bildungsroman with a twist (how do children come of age in a world of bloodshed and terror?), a detective story, exhuming layer upon layer of the past, as well as a pandemic story in which the devastations of a rising global death toll echo a nation's and a family's past. The narrator refuses the easy drug of historical amnesia and instead relentlessly pursues the elusive truth of what happened. The world is full of ghosts. There is no exorcism unless we dare to stand at the edge of the abyss and listen. At the end of the novel, our narrator calls out her cri de coeur to this beloved figure from the past: 'How could you end up this way?' A cry that echoes down the generations to this day. In her bold, brave, and beautiful book, Karina Pacheco Medrano provides us with no answers but something larger. To quote her own words, rendered in clear and lyrical translation by Mara Faye Lethem: 'Hunting time had ended. . . . She placed her hands on its wound. She sang.' Pacheco Medrano has placed her writing hands on that wound and her novel sings.""--Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies ""The Year of the Wind is as filled with beauty as it is with fury. It's an ode to friendship, home, family, but most of all to the pursuit of truth, no matter how hard it is to find or accept. An unflinching look at the horrors of the Shining Path years in Perú--but told with unmatched lyricism by a Latin American master at the height of her powers--this novel will grip you, hold you captive, and, when its mystery unravels, leave you amazed at the power of the human spirit.""--Alejandro Puyana, author of Freedom Is a Feast ""I loved The Year of the Wind by Karina Pacheco Medrano--a gorgeous, uncanny novel that haunted me in the best way. This is a book of memory and ghosts, a book of longing and magic, a book of history and a book of searching, a book that charts the life of Peru in the late twentieth century. It's also a book full of poems, visions, dreams, a book of investigation, a book that pulses with the ache of what's been lost and the fierce beauty of what remains. I don't know that I've ever read anything like it. This is a brilliant literary achievement.""--Stuart Nadler, author of Rooms for Vanishing

Author Information

Karina Pacheco Medrano is a Peruvian writer, anthropologist, and editor. She has a PhD in anthropology of the Americas and translates from French, English, and Portuguese to Spanish. She has published eleven books of fiction and four books of nonfiction. Mara Faye Lethem is an award-winning translator and author of the novel A Person's a Person, No Matter How Small. Her recent translations include books by Pol Guasch, Alana S. Portero, Patricio Pron, and Irene Solà.

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