December Breeze: A masterful novel on womanhood in Colombia

'One of the hundred most influential women in the history of Colombia.' - Cromos magazine From her home in Paris, Lina recalls the story of three women whose lives unfold in the conservative city of Barranquilla in Colombia. Amongst parties at the Country Club and strolls along the promenade in Puerto Colombia, unfurls a story of sensuality surpressed by violence; a narrative of oppression in which Dora, Catalina and Beatriz are victims of a patriarchal system living in and among the fragile threads of the fabric of society. In Lina's obsessive recounting of the past, this masterful novel transforms anecdotes of a life into an absolute view of the world, a profound panorama of Colombian society towards the end of the 50s. Written from personal memories and historical research, this is a novel that is both precise and poetic, a novel that immortalises - from the distant perspective of its narrator-the events that took place in a small seaside town. Distancing herself from her contemporaries of the Latin-American literary boom with a boldly feminist narrative, Marvel Moreno has created a world that both mirrors the close-up, private lives of the people of Barranquilla and the human condition itself.

About the Author :
Marvel Moreno was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1939. As a teenager, under her father's guide, she began to read the great writers, who would later come to bear a definitive influence upon her writing, including Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. She maintained a close relationship with the members of the "Barranquilla Group" including Gabriel García Márquez. She is well known in Colombia and is considered one of the most important Colombian writers. Her novel December Breeze was a finalist in the Plaza y Janés International Literary Prize in 1985 and was translated into Italian and French. In 1989 she received the Grinzane-Cavour prize awarded in Italy for best foreign book. She died in 1995 in Paris. Isabel Adey is a translator and editor working with English, Spanish and German. A former winner of the Emerging Translators Programme at the Goethe-Institut, her work has been featured in Latin American Literature Today, Art in Translation, and Glasgow Review of Books. She has translated fiction and nonfiction by authors including Ulrike Draesner and Alfons Kaiser. She holds an MSc in Translation from Heriot-Watt University and has taught Spanish-to-English translation to postgraduate level. Charlotte Coombe is a British literary translator working from French and Spanish into English. A two-time Pen Translates award winner, she was shortlisted for the Valle Inclán Translation Prize 2019 for her translation of Fish Soup by Margarita García Robayo. She has translated fiction and poetry by authors such as Abnousse Shalmani, Eduardo Berti, Ricardo Romero, Antonio Díaz Oliva, and Jimena González.

Review :
"Furiously feminine, raw and contemporary, Marvel Moreno lights up any literary canon with her savage portrayal: a delicate arbitrariness with which she narrated what she wanted, when she wanted, without asking anyone for permission." "Colombian writer Moreno (1939–1995) makes her English-language debut with a layered if diffuse story of late 1970s Colombia...Fans of the Latin American Boom will want to give this a look." "Moreno’s dense and incrementally meandering prose recites a litany of suffering layered upon suffering. Man’s inhumanity to (wo)man couldn’t be made any clearer." "One of the hundred most influential women in the history of Colombia." "Marvel Moreno has become one of the most renowned authors of contemporary Colombian literature."