Ecuador

The Sisters of Alameda Street

Currently available on Kindle US for $1.99

When Malens tidy, carefully planned world collapses following her father’s mysterious suicide, she finds a letter—signed with an “A”—which reveals that her mother is very much alive and living in San Isidro, a quaint town tucked in the Andes Mountains. Intent on meeting her, Malena arrives at Alameda Street and meets four sisters who couldn’t be more different from one another, but who share one thing in common: all of their names begin with an A.

To avoid a scandal, Malena assumes another woman’s identity and enters their home to discover the truth. Could her mother be Amanda, the iconoclastic widow who opens the first tango nightclub in a conservative town? Ana, the ideal housewife with a less-than-ideal past? Abigail, the sickly sister in love with a forbidden man? Or Alejandra, the artistic introvert scarred by her cousin’s murder? But living a lie will bring Malena additional problems, such as falling for the wrong man and loving a family she may lose when they learn of her deceit. Worse, her arrival threatens to expose long-buried secrets and a truth that may wreck her life.

Set in 1960s Ecuador, The Sisters of Alameda Street is a sweeping story of how one woman’s search for the truth of her identity forces a family to confront their own past.

"A family saga like no other—a story that's hard to put down." —Paula Paul

"This book is great fun. Scenes involving clandestine late-night excursions, visits to a seedy motel, and Malena's unexpected tango performances demonstrate the author's skills in writing comedy—such a rare treat in historical fiction. The many threads are carefully untangled, and the strength of family wins the day. Heartily recommended to saga readers." —Historical Novel Society

"[A] joy to read, with delectably evil villains and gratifyingly strong female characters. When those women face marital, societal, and career limitations, they end up overcoming them with ingenuity." —Santa Fe New Mexican, Pasatiempo

(Group read suggestion from Gemma Ware, book club moderator.)

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Cockfight

Named 1 of the best fiction books of 2018 by the NY Times en Español

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.” —Independent Book Review

“Ampuero leads the international wave of Ecuadorian writers.” —NY Times en Español

“Ampuero writes with steely nerves and an ear for the beauty of simple, concrete language—not a word feels out of place.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Deftly written with spare, exacting prose, Cockfight. . . .presents searing portraits of family life.” —Latino Book Review

“Wielded like a righteous cudgel against exploitative power, this Ecuadorian debut makes no bones about its intentions from the get-go. . . . Ampuero fights dirty and, frankly, that’s just the sort of writer we need.” —Center for the Art of Translation

“Ampuero’s literary voice is tough and beautiful at once: her stories are exquisite and dangerous objects.” —Yuri Herrera

“María Fernanda Ampuero’s voice is urgent, intimate, lyrical while never forgetting to cast humor during the darkest of violent moments.” —Ernesto Quiñonez

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

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Funventions

Included with Kindle Unlimited

Written by one of the most important voices of modern Ecuadorian literature. “If you like Borges, Casares, and Cortasar, buy it with your eyes closed!” —Xenia Germeni

While every year there appear scientific and technological advances to puzzle and dazzle us, people keep on loving one another, feeling fear, thinking, searching, working, walking the paths of life. The more things change, the more they stay the same: it's this paradox that Ubidia evokes so well in these stories. He fuses exotic themes, such as edible books, miniature humans proliferating in laboratories, and a crystal city with the quotidian reality of contemporary Latin America. Mixing the actual and the imaginary, he takes us beyond the limits of science and technology and into the labyrinths of the human soul.

Entertaining and profound. In each of these beautiful stories, Ubidia insists that despite its flights of fancy—including art and science—the human mind cannot go far beyond its own fears, desires, and uncertainties.

“Each story, a world. My favorite storyteller of all time.” —Stef León

“Beautifully written. The author has the gift of building exquisite phrases for the delight of the reader…Abdon uses fantasy as an excuse to explore human nature. This is the type of fantasy that succeeds in delivering not only stories to entertain, but also reflections for the reader on key matters about our humanity.” —Isidro

“Abdon Ubidia is regarded in Latin America and elsewhere as one of the most representative and relevant voices of modern Ecuadorian literature.” —Ecuador Fiction

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Jawbone

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Translated Literature, Longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize & Ms. Magazine “Favorite Books of 2022”

Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise?

When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality.

Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous “creepypastas,” Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.

“Delectable. . . . There are echoes of Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson at play, but the vision is ultimately Ojeda’s own―delicious in how it seduces and disturbs the reader as the girls rely on horror both as entertainment and as a way of staving off the actual terrors of growing up. This is creepy good fun.” ―Publishers Weekly

“Edgar Allan Poe meets a few of the mean girls. . . . Mother-daughter relationships slide under Ojeda’s microscope, sharing space with the teacher-student dynamic and deities as objects in an exploration of power and sexuality during adolescence. . . . Every good horror story needs a victim; Ojeda’s monsters and victims wear the same faces.” ―Kirkus

“Rife with gothic body horror and the darkness of the jungle and within ourselves. . . . Ojeda is a strikingly singular voice, combining basic teen angst with stark madness and the power of teen girls to push back in a world that tries to make them powerless.” ―The Brooklyn Rail

(A special thank you to book club member, Jordi Valbuena for the suggestion.)

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The Other Son of God

The Other Son of God is the English version of Al norte de Dios, the tenth novel by the renowned Ecuadorian writer, Nelson Estupinan Bass. The author situates the work within the realm of the fantastic, a move that enables him to give free rein to his imagination. The protagonist, Satan, is the son that God, in his youth, fathered with an African woman. While serving as God’s aide-de-camp, Satan rebels and is banished to hell. The cause of the rebellion is Satan’s belief that God has been giving preferential treatment to Satan’s brother.

The action begins when God, disappointed with Jesus’ failure to reform man during his stay on earth, sentences Jesus to one year in a prison in hell, summons his black son to heaven, and reassigns the task of man’s rehabilitation to him. Satan accepts the challenge and returns to hell, accompanied by Sister Etelvina, a former nun, who has become bored with life in heaven, and Jesus. The former nun quickly becomes a trusted aide to Satan and is the narrator who describes the physical features of hell as well as the work activities and punishments of the condemned.

On earth, Satan, with the help of seven disciples, works to reform man. He then spends some time in hell before returning to heaven accompanied by Jesus and his family (Jesus gets married while in hell and fathers a child there.) In God’s meeting with Satan and Jesus, the focus of the conversation is on Satan’s activities on earth and God’s ideas for the future of heaven, hell, and earth.

It is worth noting that the author takes pains to examine common social, political and ethical issues encountered in all three settings—heaven, hell and earth—in which the action of the novel unfolds.

(Group read suggestion from Sue Attalla, book club moderator.)

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This World Does Not Belong to Us

Winner English PEN Award

After years away, Lucas returns uninvited to the home he was expelled from as a child. The garden has been conquered by weeds, which blanket his mother’s beloved flowerbeds and his father’s grave alike. A lot has changed since Eloy and Felisberto were invited into the family home to work for Lucas’s father, long ago. The two hulking strangers have brought the land and everyone on it under their control—and removed nuisances like Lucas. Now everything rots. Lucas, a hardened young man, turns to a world that thrives in dirt and darkness: the world of insects. In raw, lyrical prose, García Freire portrays a world brought low by human greed, while hinting at glimmers of hope in the unlikeliest places.

“One of the debut novels that most stood out this year in Latin America.” —NY Times

”Who would have thought that a novel so overflowing with animals, insects, flowers, and shrubs could teach us so much about ourselves?”—Latin American Literature Today

”This World Does Not Belong to Us leads the reader into the deepest, darkest regions of human existence, where what is most infected and rotten becomes beautiful and liberating.” —Toda Literatura

“A deliciously menacing read which I just couldn't put down. Every word punches hard.” —Jan Carson

”I am moved by its tenderness, the shadow of its flight, the kingdom it comes from. Insect and poverty. Larva and death.” —Dara Scully

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