Smoke

"Smoke is a truly remarkable piece of storytelling. In this compellingly meticulous narrative, Gabriela Alemán guides her characters to a suspenseful reckoning with their unreconciled histories in the South American backwater of Paraguay. In passages that alternate between the relentlessly vivid and claustrophobically dreamlike past and present, Alemán delivers a contemplation on human nature and historical memory that is as unsettling as it is unforgettable."—Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
What happens to a country and its people after 35 years of terror? The author of Poso Wells and Family Album explores the aftermath of a dictatorship in this gothic family saga.
"Gabriela Alemán has written a terrible and beautiful story about the delicate borders between what is known and what is invented, and about the places where intimate tragedy and the tragedies of history intersect. Her characters may appear to traverse a kind of voyage back to the origin, but in fact they are seeking their own path to survive in monstrous times."—Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
After 19 years, a woman named Gabriela returns to the Paraguayan capital of Asunción to visit what's left of a family and a home that once provided her with refuge. Andrei, the family patriarch, now deceased, has left her his journal. Gabriela sequesters herself in the library to slowly read through it. The unanswered, and sometimes forbidden questions haunting that home filled with memories are made palpable: What secrets must be kept in order to survive? And for how long?
Alemán situates the present in an eerie, dreamlike atmosphere saturated by a sense of foreboding. In alternating chapters, the past is revealed as an impossible puzzle, riddled with ellipses and gaps. As characters from the past begin to show up in the present, the novel comes to a close as Gabriela learns the family's hidden story, set against the backdrop of the country's troubled history.

Gabriela Alemán is the author of ten books, including the novels Poso Wells (City Lights, 2018) and the short story collection Family Album (City Lights, 2022). An author of critical essays on literature and film, she is a founding member of the publishing house El Fakir Editores, based in Ecuador. At Tulane University, she developed the Latin American Writers Series, a digital archive of contemporary Latin American Literature. She currently lives in Quito, Ecuador.