The Year of the Wind

A lyrical novel depicting the devastating effects of political violence in Peru on three women’s lives

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 doppelg?nger of B?rbara, 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 B?rbara’s fate, Nina begins to weave a new cloth of memory. She learns more about B?rbara’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.

Author: Karina Pacheco Medrano
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 11/04/2025
Pages: 240
Weight: 1lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.50w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781644453650
Language: English