All the Names of Feliza

Irreverent, mischievous and utterly committed to her art, Feliza Burzstyn turned Colombian culture upside down by defying convention, making extraordinary art out of scrap metal and refusing to play the simpering feminine role that her country's macho culture demanded of her. Feliza always went her own way, never doubting the inseparability of self and art. Art was her everything, even as it cost her her marriage, the custody of her three daughters, and the support of her parents when she left her American husband. But after a terrifying night-time interrogation by paramilitary "police" in Bogotá who don't like her Cuban friends, she fled her country and as the novel opens finds herself an exile in Paris, where decades before she had discovered her gift as a sculptor. In the bitter dawn of 1982, thousands of miles from home, Feliza is trying to piece life together anew, the way she fashions scrap metal into her distinctive sculptures. But as a reunion with her good friend and fellow exile, the great Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, draws near, an apprehension grows that not even her instinctive irreverence and ebullience can allay. All the Names of Feliza is Juan Gabriel Vásquez's impassioned, engrossing portrait of a woman racing, with ingenuity and imagination, to outstrip the private and public social forces arrayed against her. Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean