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The Bitch

by Pilar Quintana

Care, longing, and loss on Colombia’s Pacific coast

Regular price $16.48 USD
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AlbakiReads Editorial

Care, longing, and loss on Colombia’s Pacific coast

Set in a shack above Colombia’s rough Pacific coast, the novel centers on Damaris, whose unfulfilled wish for a child and cooling marriage shape her life with her fisherman husband. When she takes in an orphaned puppy, the new bond brings her longing to nurture into contact with painful losses and the need for care herself. The coastal village and nearby jungle frame a story about motherhood beyond conventional family ties, the vulnerability of attachment, and the unequal pressures surrounding women’s lives. Its focus on both giving care and needing it makes the dog’s place in Damaris’s world central to the novel’s exploration of desire and grief.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in literary fiction set in coastal Colombia.
  • Readers drawn to stories about motherhood, attachment, and loss.
  • Readers seeking novels that explore care and women’s lives.

Themes

Motherhood and longingCare and attachmentLoss and griefWomen’s lives and social pressureColombia’s Pacific coast

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATION

"A perfect book." --Kiran Desai, author of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

"Unforgettable. . . a powerful, jolting tale about class, motherhood and rage." --The Guardian

In this intense, spare, brilliantly observed novel, a woman's dangerously primal feelings are awakened when she adopts an orphaned puppy


On a bluff overlooking Colombia's rough Pacific coast, at the edge of the jungle--a world where nothing is taken for granted -Damaris lives in a shack with her fisherman husband. Her dream of a child unfulfilled and the warmth of her marriage cooled, she has reached the age "when women dry up," as her uncle puts it. When the opportunity arises, she takes in a motherless puppy with eagerness and immediate affection. She does not yet know the risk she is taking in forging a bond that touches her most painful losses and her tenderest yearnings.

In prose as terse as the villagers Damaris lives among, The Bitch evokes the double-edged force of the instinct to nurture and the desperate desire to be nurtured in turn.
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