This month, we’re checking all of our style bins with a lyrical memoir that blends one household’s tales with Columbia’s turbulent political historical past. It’s a nonfiction reflection that reads like a fiction novel—so we expect each reader will discover one thing to take pleasure in!
Be a part of us as we dive into Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ The Man Who Might Transfer Clouds!
Raised in Colombia within the 80s and 90s by a fortune-telling mom, Rojas Contreras (who additionally wrote our 2019 Ebook Membership choice, Fruit of the Drunken Tree) had a childhood filled with magic and steeped in political violence. Her mom’s father, Nono, was a famend curandero, a neighborhood healer gifted with what her household referred to as “the secrets and techniques.”
The magic didn’t really feel prefer it belonged to her … till she suffered a head damage that left her with amnesia in her twenties. Spurred by a robust urge to relearn her household historical past within the aftermath of her reminiscence loss, Rojas Contreras and her mom journey to Colombia. Via the pages of The Man Who Might Transfer Clouds, we are going to be part of this mom and daughter on their journey as they hint their lineage again to Indigenous and Spanish roots and uncover the origins of “the secrets and techniques.”
Patricia Engel, creator of our Might 2021 Ebook Membership choose, Infinite Nation, raved that “Rojas Contreras has given us a wonderful reward with these pages,” describing it as “a memoir like no different.” And The New York Occasions Ebook Evaluation referred to as it “a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral historical past.”
