Engel, Patricia

Patricia Engel is the author of The Veins of the Ocean: A Novel; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris: A Novel; and Vida. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. In Infinite Country: A Novel (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), Talia is an American daughter of Colombian parents who is serving time at a correctional facility for adolescent girls. Her father and a plane ticket to the U.S. are waiting for her back home in Bogotá. But can she really bring herself to trade the solid facts of her father and life in Colombia for the distant vision of her mother and siblings in America? Her story, a tale of how her family came to be in two different countries and two different worlds, comes into focus like twists of a kaleidoscope. The New York Times noted that the book’s “prose is serpentine and exciting … [with] intimate and meticulously rendered descriptions of Andean landscapes and mythology, of Colombia’s long history of violence. … a compulsively readable novel.”