The Farm

Hector Abad

pri 2018 · Archipelago

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Closely knit Colombian siblings' internal rifts threaten to tear apart the hard-won legacy their father fought to establish against guerilla and paramilitary violence. An intimate and transgressive novel that confirms Héctor Abad as one of the great writers of Latin American literature today.

Pilar, Eva, and Antonio Ángel are the last heirs of La Oculta, a farm hidden in the mountains of Colombia. The land has survived several generations. It is the landscape of their happiest memories but it is also where they have had to face the siege of violence and terror, restlessness and flight.

In The Farm, Héctor Abad illuminates the vicissitudes of a family and of a people, as well as of the voices of these three siblings, recounting their loves, fears, desires, and hopes, all against a dazzling backdrop. We enter their lives at the moment when they are about to lose the paradise on which they built their dreams and their reality.

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Héctor Abad is one of Colombia's leading writers. Born in 1958, he grew up in Medellín, where he studied medicine, philosophy, and journalism. After being expelled from university for writing a defamatory text against the Pope, he moved to Italy before returning to his homeland in 1987. Abad has worked as a lecturer in Spanish at the University of Verona and as a translator of Italian literature. His translations from the Italian include works by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Umberto Eco. Abad writes a weekly column for Columbia's national newspaper El Spectador. His memoir, Oblivion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), was met with widespread critical acclaim. His novel La oculta (The Farm) won the 2015 Cálamo Prize in Spain and was shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Prize.

About the Translator: Anne McLean has translated works by Javier Cercas, Evelio Rosero, Juan Gabriel Vázquez, Ignacio Martinez de Pisón, Carmen Martín Gaite, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Héctor Abad, as well as Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, Diary of Andrés Fava, and From the Observatory by Julio Cortázar (Archipelago). In 2012 she was awarded the Cruz de Oficial of the Order of Civil Merit in 2012 in recognition of her contribution to making Spanish literature known to a wider public.