Tales From the Town of Widows and Chronicles From the Land of Men

A beautifully crafted story about a group of women in a Colombian village who find their lives changed while their husbands and sons are away fighting a deadly civil war. The women of Mariquita, made widows when their men are swept away by the army or rebel forces, learn hard lessons about love and survival. Forced to grow in extraordinary ways, they challenge the tenets of male-dominated society, discover power with all its pitfalls and strive to create an entirely newsocial order, an all-female utopia. Their narrative is punctuated by short vignettes of the individual travails of the men and boys -- left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, national army officers and civilians -- caught amidst these hellish forces. The author, lived in his native Colombia until he was 18 and this pitch-perfect book brings an entirely fresh, startling perspective to Colombia's catastrophe where the longest and bloodiest civil war in this hemisphere has raged for 40 years.