Tales From the Town of Widows & Chronicles From the Land of Me
* Prix du Premier Meilleur Roman Étranger, 2008
* Prix des Lecteurs de Vincennes, 2008
* Prix des Lecteurs du Télégramme, Finalist, 2009
* Edmund White Fiction Award, Finalist, 2008
* Lambda Best Début Fiction Award, Finalist, 2008
* One Brown Book, One Nation Program, Finalist, 2008
* Best Adult Book of the Year, School Library Journal, 2008
* Top Pick for Reading Groups, Kirkus Reviews, 2007
Praised internationally as “An important contribution to American literature,” this brilliant novel tells the story of Mariquita, a mountain village that’s forever altered the day a band of communist guerrillas forcibly recruits all but three of its men.
Left to fend for themselves with an ethically challenged priest, a transvestite and a withdrawn gay man, the virtual widows slowly emerge from their supporting roles as wives and daughters to become unwitting founders of a remarkable new society: an all-female utopia far greater than any revolutionary’s imagined ideal society.
And when some of the men come home after their 16-year absence and try to reclaim their power, things get really interesting . . .
Deft, rich and darkly humorous, Tales From the Town of Widows & Chronicles From the Land of Men marks the arrival of an unforgettable new literary talent.
> Read an excerpt from the novel
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“James Cañón achieves an extraordinary combination of largeness and intimacy. Here is the sweep of history together with the feeling of home, both conveyed with high intelligence and real eloquence. Cañón is a young American—in the broader, hemispheric sense of the word—to celebrate.”
— Benjamin Kunkel
“Cañón is a gifted storyteller, as full of his radical purpose as Jonathan Swift, as enchanting as Gabriel García-Márquez, as brainy as Pamuk, yet his anger and compassion, as well as his humor, are distinctly his own.”
— Maureen Howard
“Like his villagers, Cañón has built a new world on an old—a realigned literary landscape, with new sex roles, new stubbornness, new glory, and new wreckage. A much-loved tradition of Colombian fiction has been gorgeously re-imagined.”
— Joan Silber
