Patricia Engel

For readers of Valeria Luiselli and Edwidge Danticat, an urgent and lyrical novel about a Colombian family fractured by deportation, offering an intimate perspective on an experience that so many have endured—and are enduring right now. At the dawn of the new millennium, Colombia is a country devastated by half a century of violence. Elena and Mauro are teenagers when they meet, their blooming love an antidote to the mounting brutality of life in Bogotá. Once their first daughter is born, and facing grim economic prospects, they set their sights on the United States. They travel to Houston and send wages back to Elena’s mother, all the while weighing whether to risk overstaying their tourist visas or to return to Bogotá. As their family expands, and they move again and again, their decision to ignore their exit dates plunges the young family into the precariousness of undocumented status, the threat of discovery menacing a life already strained. When Mauro is deported, Elena, now tasked with caring for their three small children, makes a difficult choice that will ease her burdens but splinter the family even further. Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engel, herself the daughter of Colombian immigrants and a dual citizen, gives voice to Mauro and Elena, as well as their children, Karina, Nando, and Talia—each one navigating a divided existence, weighing their allegiance to the past, the future, to one another, and to themselves. Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality for the undocumented in America, Infinite Country is the story of two countries and one mixed-status family—for whom every triumph is stitched with regret and every dream pursued bears the weight of a dream deferred.

Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, A New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the International Latino Book Award “Engel has an eye for detail. She knows how to drown the reader in a sense of enchantment... She writes exquisite moments.”—Roxane Gay, The NationReina Castillo is the alluring young woman whose beloved brother is serving a death sentence for a crime that shocked the community, throwing a baby off a bridge—a crime for which Reina secretly blames herself. With her brother's death, though devastated and in mourning, Reina is finally released from her prison vigil. Seeking anonymity, she moves to a sleepy town in the Florida Keys where she meets Nesto Cadena, a recently exiled Cuban awaiting with hope the arrival of the children he left behind in Havana. Through Nesto’s love of the sea and capacity for faith, Reina comes to understand her own connections to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds her as well as its role in her family's troubled history, and in their companionship, begins to find freedom from the burden of guilt she carries for her brother’s crime.Set in the vibrant coastal and Caribbean communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, with The Veins of the Ocean Patricia Engel delivers a profound and riveting Pan-American story of fractured lives finding solace and redemption in the beauty and power of the natural world, and in one another.

From Patricia Engel, whose novel Infinite Country was a New York Times bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick, comes a “rich and compelling” ( The Washington Post ) collection of ten exquisite, award-winning short stories set across the Americas and linked by themes of migration, sacrifice, and moral compromise.Two Colombian expats meet as strangers on the rainy streets of New York City, both burdened with traumatic pasts. In Cuba, a woman discovers her deceased brother’s bones have been stolen, and the love of her life returns from Ecuador for a one-night visit. A cash-strapped couple hustles in Miami, to life-altering ends.The Faraway World is a collection of arresting stories from the New York Times bestselling author of Infinite Country , Patricia Engel, “a gifted storyteller whose writing shines even in the darkest corners” ( The Washington Post ). Intimate and panoramic, these stories bring to life the liminality of regret, the vibrancy of community, and the epic deeds and quiet moments of love.

Fresh, accomplished, and fearless, Vida marks the debut of Patricia Engel, a young author of immense talent and promise. Vida follows a single narrator, Sabina, as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora and struggles to find her place within and beyond the net of her strong, protective, but embattled family.In “Lucho,” Sabina’s family—already “foreigners in a town of blancos”—is shunned by the community when a relative commits an unspeakable act of violence, but she is in turn befriended by the town bad boy who has a secret of his own; in “Desaliento,” Sabina surrounds herself with other young drifters who spend their time looking for love and then fleeing from it—until reality catches up with one of them; and in “Vida,” the urgency of Sabina’s self-imposed exile in Miami fades when she meets an enigmatic Colombian woman with a tragic past.Patricia Engel maps landscapes both actual and interior in this stunning debut, and the constant throughout is Sabina—serious, witty, alternately cautious and reckless, open to transformation yet skeptical of its lasting power. Infused by a hard-won, edgy wisdom, Vida introduces a sensational new literary voice.

Patricia Engel’s collection of stories, Vida—a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award—established its author as one of our country’s best young writers. Her first novel is a vibrant and wistful narrative about an American girl abroad in Paris, who navigates the intoxicating and treacherous complexities of independence, friendship, and romance.Lita del Cielo, the daughter of two Colombian orphans who arrived in America with nothing and made a fortune with their Latin food empire, has been granted one year to pursue her studies in Paris before returning to work in the family business. She moves into a gently crumbling Left Bank mansion known as “The House of Stars,” where a spirited but bedridden Countess Séraphine rents out rooms to young women visiting Paris to work, study, and, unofficially, to find love.Cautious and guarded, Lita keeps a cool distance from the other girls, who seem at once boldly adult and impulsively naïve, who both intimidate and fascinate her. Then Lita meets Cato, and the contours of her world shift. Charming, enigmatic, and weak with illness, Cato is the son of a notorious right-wing politician. As Cato and Lita retreat to their own world, they soon find it difficult to keep the outside world from closing in on theirs. Ultimately Lita must decide whether to stay in France with Cato or return home to fulfill her immigrant family’s dreams for her future.It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris is a spellbinding love story, a portrait of a Paris caught between old world grandeur and the international greenblood elite, and an exploration of one woman’s journey to distinguish honesty from artifice and lay claim to her own life.

Available exclusive to the Kindle, “The Bridge,” by Patricia Engel, is the story of Carlito and Reina, a brother and sister from Miami. When he was a boy, Carlito was thrown from a bridge by his distraught father. Saved by a fisherman, Carlito was treated with special care throughout his life: no one bothered him about school, about his manners, about beating up his sister. Years later, when he found out his girlfriend was unfaithful, Carlito threw her baby off a bridge. Murder is Carlito’s inheritance, people say, and he is paying the price, languishing on death row at Florida’s South Glades Penitentiary. Only his sister, Reina, refuses to abandon him, visiting him every weekend to preserve his humanity, and to drive away her own terrible secret. “The Bridge” combines the lyricism of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the stripped-down realism of a Raymond Carver to produce a story that will sadden readers’ hearts while expanding their souls.

Uma família separada pelo sonho americano. Best seller premiado pelo New York Times, esta história emocionante apresenta a trajetória de Talia, uma filha de imigrantes colombianos nos Estados Unidos, lutando contra o tempo para alcançar a terra do tio Sam. Fugidos de uma guerra civil, os pais da moça cruzam as fronteiras da América Latina em busca de novas oportunidades, deixando para trás um país devastado. Nestas páginas envolventes, você encontrará uma narrativa atravessada pelas dores da deportação e da distância.

Reina Castillo is an alluring young woman whose beloved brother is serving a death sentence for a crime that shocked the throwing a baby off a bridge - a crime for which Reina secretly blames herself. With her brother's death, though devastated and in mourning, Reina is finally released from her prison vigil. Seeking anonymity, she moves to a sleepy town in the Florida Keys, where she meets Nesto Cadena, a recently exiled Cuban awaiting with hope the arrival of the children he left behind in Havana.Through Nesto's love of the sea and capacity for faith, Reina comes to understand her own connections to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds her as well as its role in her family's troubled history, and in their companionship she begins to find freedom from the burden of guilt she carries for her brother's crime.Set in the vibrant coastal and Caribbean communities of Miami; the Florida Keys; Havana, Cuba; and Cartagena, Colombia, with The Veins of the Ocean, Patricia Engel delivers a profound and riveting Pan-American story of fractured lives finding solace and redemption in the beauty and power of the natural world - and in one another.

Das Buch ist für den Restaurator und den Globusfreund gleichermaßen geschrieben. Globenrestaurierung fußt einerseits auf Restaurierungstheorien und bedarf andererseits des intensiven Studiums dieser außergewöhnlichen Kulturgüter. Das Buch liefert dem Restaurator konkrete Vorschläge und versorgt den Sammler und Museumskurator mit wertvollen Hinweisen zu fachgerechter Lagerung, Handhabung und Präsentation. Das Buch bringt neue Forschungsergebnisse, z.B. zum Thema Metallgloben mit Papierzwickeln und weist auf den Nutzen, die die Kenntnis der Materialität von Globen auch anderen Disziplinen in der Forschung bringt hin. Das Buch basiert auf über 30 Jahren Erfahrung der Autorin auf dem Gebiet.Globe-Conservation is based on theories and intense studies. This book is written for the conservator-restorer to give him or her new knowledge, especially the chapter on globes made of metal spheres with paper gores is an entirely new research work. But also the other parts are systematized and exhaustively researched. It is also written for the layman to make him or her appreciate the globe at hand, possibly in his or her property even more and to guide him or her to store, handle and keep it properly.Finally the book will be interesting for the researcher on globes, as it might open a historian, a geographer etc. his or her eyes for the material used in the globes and the information inherent in it.The material is based on the 30 years experience of the author in the field of conservation-restoration in general and globe conservation in particular.