Blood of the Dawn follows three women whose lives intertwine and are ripped apart during what's known as “the time of fear” in Peruvian history when the Shining Path militant insurgency was at its peak. The novel rewrites the conflict through the voice of women, activating memory through a mixture of politics, desire, and pain in lucid, brutal prose.
The stories of the three women converge at the end, in a series of horrifically violent passages—they're as different from one another as can be, but they end up sharing the same experience. It's as upsetting as you could possibly imagine.
“Blood of the Dawn is a short novel, and maybe that's why it's so effective. Salazar Jiménez and translator Elizabeth Bryer make every word count, and the result is a work of concentrated intensity with no room for the reader to escape the horrors that fill just about every page. It's a novel that never lets the reader blink, until the terrifying last words … The violence that permeated Peru in the 1980s and 1990s is unspeakable, which is exactly why it needs to be spoken. That's what Jiménez does in this beautiful, horrifying work of art.” —NPR
(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)
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