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Haunting tale of Colombian orphan

The Children
by Carolina Sanin
(MacLehose Press, £14)

THROUGHOUT Colombia there are 2.5 million children — one out of every three — who have lost parents due to civil conflict, HIV/Aids or who’ve been abandoned due to extreme poverty, parental drug abuse or arrest. Of them, 40,000 are “displaced.”

Those are the grim statistics underpinning The Children, a compelling debut novel by young Colombian writer Carolina Sanin, who sheds light on the abandoned children of Bogota in a work imbued with humanity, intelligence and social awareness.

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