A masterful novel exploring womanhood, class, and tradition in 1950s Colombia

“One of the hundred most influential women in the history of Colombia.”—Cromos magazine

From her home in Paris, Lina recalls the story of three women whose lives unfold in the conservative city of Barranquilla in Colombia. Amongst parties at the Country Club and strolls along the promenade in Puerto Colombia, unfurls a story of sensuality supressed by violence; a narrative of oppression in which Dora, Catalina and Beatriz are victims of a patriarchal system living in and among the fragile threads of the fabric of society. 

In Lina’s obsessive recounting of the past, this masterful novel transforms anecdotes of a life into an absolute view of the world, a profound panorama of Colombian society towards the end of the 50s.

Written from personal memories and historical research, this is a novel that is both precise and poetic, a novel that immortalises—from the distant perspective of its narrator—the events that took place in a small seaside town.

Distancing herself from her contemporaries of the Latin-American literary boom with a boldly feminist narrative, Marvel Moreno has created a world that both mirrors the close-up, private lives of the people of Barranquilla and the human condition itself.

Marvel Moreno
Marvel Moreno was born in Barranquilla, the capital city of the Atlántico department of Colombia, in 1939. As a teenager, under her father’s guidance, she began to read the great writers, many of whom would later come to bear a definitive influence upon her writing: Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner among them. Moreno maintained a close relationship with the members of the “Barranquilla Group,” including Gabriel García Márquez. She is well known in Colombia and is considered one of the most important Colombian writers. Her novel December Breeze was a finalist in the Plaza y Janés International Literary Prize in 1985. In 1989, Moreno received the Grinzane-Cavour prize awarded in Italy for best foreign book. She died in 1995 in Paris.