Like This Afternoon Forever

“Manrique is our Scheherazade.”

—Sandra Cisneros

“A novel about two seminary students who fall in love, Like This Afternoon Forever is a powerful story of religion, poverty, sexuality, and tenderness, as quick and intense as a fairy tale, yet as real and brutal as contemporary Latin America. Jaime Manrique has written a beautiful, moving narrative about two good men in a dangerous world.”

—Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters

“A tremendous novel, beautiful, passionate, and compassionate. In it we are able to recognize ourselves and, perhaps more importantly, come face to face with the other, unknown to us only because we choose not to see.”

— El Tiempo (Colombia)

“ Like This Afternoon Forever is magnificent. On one level it is a simple and moving story of love between two poor young Colombian men, Lucas and Ignacio. Jaime Manrique tells their story in a voice that magically balances lyrical intimacy with reportorial distance; he has given us a novel that at once conveys the immediacy of art and the weight of headlines. A very special book.”

—Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

“Manrique is a sophisticated rarity in contemporary letters.”

— El País (Colombia)

“Manrique is a brilliant, agile, and supremely natural storyteller. He builds a world so deeply imagined that it seems to come from air, and so real it feels pulled directly from memory. Like This Afternoon Forever is both a great gay novel and a great novel, simply. It provides an intimate view of Colombia we would not have access to otherwise. This suspenseful and deeply moving story is also romantic, disturbing, sad, wise, funny, sexy, and full of truths. I will remember this book and these characters as if I knew them personally.”

—Ira Sachs, award-winning filmmaker of Little Men

“Manrique fashions a tale of love, demystifying themes such as the amorous passion between two men, while tracing their pastoral efforts in areas of open conflict and poverty. The more you read, the more you’re drawn into their story.”

— La Opinión (Colombia)

“Jaime Manrique is a brilliant writer—compassionate, lyrical, and emotionally precise—and Like This Afternoon Forever is dazzling and heartbreaking, a page-turning masterpiece that kept me up for hours. I loved this book.”

—Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans

For the last fifty years, the Colombian drug cartels, various insurgent groups, and the government have fought over the control of the drug traffic, in the process destroying vast stretches of the Amazon, devastating Indian communities, and killing tens of thousands of homesteaders caught in the middle of the conflict.

Inspired by these events, Jaime Manrique's sixth novel, Like This Afternoon Forever , weaves in two narratives: the shocking story of a series of murders known internationally as "the false positives," and the related story of two gay Catholic priests who become lovers when they meet in the seminary.

Lucas (the son of farmers) and Ignacio (a descendant of the Baru indigenous people) enter the seminary out of a desire to help others and to get an education. Their visceral love story undergoes stages of passion, indifference, rage, and a final commitment to stay together until the end of their lives. Working in a community largely composed of people displaced by the war, Ignacio stumbles upon the horrifying story of the false positives, which will put the lives of the two men in grave danger.