The Book of Emma Reyes

“Startling and astringently poetic.” —The New York Times

An extraordinary account, in the tradition of The House on Mango Street, Child of the Dark, and Angela’s Ashes, of a Colombian woman’s harrowing childhood defined by uprootedness and migration

Emma Reyes was an illegitimate child, raised in a windowless room in Bogotá with no water or toilet and only ingenuity to keep her and her sister alive. Abandoned by her mother, she moved with her sister to a Catholic convent, where she scrubbed f...