MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds Rosamund Pike’s punchy and tragic portrayal of a multi-tasking mother and high court judge
Latest editorial
Haunting tale of Colombian orphan
FIONA O CONNOR recommends an unflinching depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftershocks, set in a working-class Liverpool family
New releases from Paul Weller, Wet Leg, and Dino Saluzzi
PAUL DONOVAN relishes the spectacle of a 1950s detective in pursuit of a 500-year-old murder mystery
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
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.
More from this author
LEO BOIX reviews a caustic novel of resistance and womanhood by Buenos Aires-born Lucia Lijtmaer, and an electrifying poetry collection by Chilean Vicente Huidobro
LEO BOIX salutes the revelation that British art has always had a queer pulse, long before the term became cultural currency
Novels by Cuban Carlos Manuel Alvarez and Argentinean Andres Tacsir, a political novella in verse by Uruguayan Mario Benedetti, and a trilogy of poetry books by Mexican cult poet Bruno Dario
LEO BOIX introduces a bold novel by Mapuche writer Daniela Catrileo, a raw memoir from Cuban-Russian author Anna Lidia Vega Serova, and powerful poetry by Mexican Juana Adcock
