The Year of the Wind

Pacheco Medrano dazzles in her English-language debut, the surreal story of a 50-something Peruvian writer reckoning with her cousin’s disappearance during the government’s conflict with a Maoist insurgency in the 1980s. Soon after moving to Madrid in January 2020, Nina is shocked to encounter a woman who’s the spitting image of her cousin, Bárbara Varas, whom she hasn’t seen in 40 years. The woman introduces herself as Berna and declares that Bárbara is dead without offering any explanation as to how she knows this. Afterward, Nina fixates on the past, recalling how when she was 11 in 1980, 17-year-old Bárbara moved in with Nina’s family to attend university. Nina also remembers the closely guarded letters Bárbara received from a mysterious suitor before leaving in 1982 for a rural teaching post in Hatun Umara. As Nina dives down an online rabbit hole trying to identify the suitor, she reflects on how Bárbara became radicalized at school and suspects she might have joined the far-left guerilla group Shining Path. Pacheco Medrano effectively suffuses her detective plot with a polyphonic mix of voices, including Bárbara’s and her grandmother’s. After Nina travels back to Peru in the narrative’s second half, a series of harrowing revelations explain the encounter in Madrid. It’s a powerful meditation on the irrevocable toll of political violence. Agent: Paula Canal, Indent Literary. (Nov.)