The Long Night of White Chickens

Francisco Goldman

Dec 2007 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

About this ebook

This acclaimed novel by the Pulitzer Prize–finalist is “at once a story about a boy growing up in two cultures, a love story, and a mystery” (The Boston Globe).

Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, The Long Night of White Chickens announced Francisco Goldman’s arrival as a major literary talent. It is both a suspenseful mystery and a tale of two worlds that plumbs the darkest depths of the relationship between the United States and Guatemala.

Goldman tells the story of Roger Graetz, raised in a Boston suburb by an aristocratic Guatemalan mother and Jewish father, and Flor de Mayo, the beautiful young Guatemalan orphan who lives with the family as a maid. Similar in age, Roger and Flor become close, and remain so even after she leaves to attend college at Wellesley. After graduation, however, Flor returns home to Guatemala City, where she heads a local orphanage that arranges international adoptions.

When she’s murdered, Roger is stunned and can’t believe the rumors he hears about her life. Years later, he travels to Guatemala to uncover the circumstances around Flor’s mysterious death in this “wonderful book” that is as “complex as history, funny as love, painful as death” (The Washington Post Book World).

“A richly layered, genre-busting novel that shuttles between suburban Boston and Guatemala City and devours everything in its path.” —Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City

About the author

Francisco Goldman has published four novels and two books of non-fiction. The Long Night of White Chickens was awarded the American Academy's Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. His novels have been finalists for several prizes, including, twice, The Pen/Faulkner Prize. The Ordinary Seaman was a finalist for The International IMPAC Dublin literary award. The Divine Husband was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. The Art of Political Murder won The Index on Censorship T.R. Fyvel Book Award and The WOLA/Duke Human Rights Book Award. The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle, published in 2013, was named by the LA Times one of ten best books of the year and received The Blue Metropolis "Premio Azul" 2017. His most recent novel, Say Her Name, won the 2011 Prix Femina Etranger. His books have been published in sixteen languages. Francisco Goldman has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the NY Public Library, and a Berlin Fellow at the American Academy. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also received a 2017 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Prize, and has just been named a recipient of PENMexico’s 2017 Award for Journalistic and Literary Excellence. He has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The Believer, and many other publications. He directs the Aura Estrada Prize (www.auraestradaprize.org). Every year Goldman teaches one semester at Trinity College in Hartford, CT., and then hightails it back to Mexico City.