SSFPL Monthly Book Club - Where there was Fire by John Manuel Arias

ABOUT THE BOOK

Costa Rica, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fruit Company’s most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a massive cover-up, the future of Teresa Cepeda Valverde’s family is changed forever.

 

Now, twenty-seven years later, Teresa and her daughter Lyra are still picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa, but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful night.Teresa, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mother, Amarga, is unable to reconcile the past.

What unfolds is a story of a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand, and the mystery at the heart of one family’s rupture, steeped in machismo, jealousy, labor uprisings, and the havoc wreaked by banana plantations in Central America.

Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, John Manuel Arias weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Manuel Arias is the National Bestselling author of Where There Was Fire, named a Best Debut by Apple Books and a Finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize.

A Canto Mundo fellow & an alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, his prose and poetry have been published in Harper's Bazaar, Electric Lit, The Kenyon Review, and PANK. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.