Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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Haunting tale of Colombian orphan
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Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
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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.
Its protagonist, care worker Laura Romero, does her weekly shopping in one of the many supermarket centres that thrive in the sprawling Colombian capital where, one day, a mysterious beggar who watches the cars outside the mall, makes her an offer. “I’ll keep the child for you,” she whispers and that apparently misheard remark transforms Laura’s life for ever.
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