“Karina Pacheco Medrano’s The Year of the Wind is an exquisitely textured immersion in recent Peruvian history, told through the lens of a female narrator who goes in search of answers to the disappearance of her beloved muse-cousin and the painful secrets a family, community, and country have inured in silence. We, readers, live and breathe that history of a bloody war between government forces and the Shining Path guerilla movement that left over 70,000 dead, through intriguing characters, encounters, stories that bring those facts to life. The Year of the Wind is complex interweave, at once a bildungsroman with a twist (how do children come of age in a world of bloodshed and terror?), a detective story, exhuming layer upon layer of the past, as well as a pandemic story in which the devastations of a rising global death toll echo a nation’s and a family’s past. The narrator refuses the easy drug of historical amnesia but instead relentlessly pursues the elusive truth of what happened. The world is full of ghosts. There is no exorcism unless we dare to stand at the edge of the abyss and listen. At the end of the novel, our narrator calls out her cri de coeur to this beloved figure from the past: How could you end up this way? A cry that echoes down the generations to this day. In her bold, brave, and beautiful book, Karina Pacheco Medrano providesus with no answers but something larger. To quote her own words, rendered in clear and lyrical translation by Mara Faye Lethem: Hunting time has ended. . . She placed her hands on its wound. She sang. Pacheco Medrano has placed her writing hands on that wound and her novel sings.
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“An anthropologist and a prolific writer, Karina Pacheco has written half a dozen novels and short story collections where the spirits of the archaic world resist the assault of the cruel pragmatism of modern society. This is what happens in many of the stories in Lluvia (2018), a beautiful collection of stories with a contained and suggestive lyricism. Social discrimination and the internal armed conflict are other leitmotifs, as seen in La voluntad del molle (2006)—one of the most notable novels in the country of the last 20 years. The letters discovered by a pair of privileged sisters in Cusco are the starting point for an investigation into that dark historical period and its consequences in a handful of particular destinations, in this way resembling a family tree that is, ultimately, that of our collective relationships that have been fragmented by official stories that relativize so many murders and disappearances. A creator who is allergic to editorial trends and the conventions of the time.”

“One of the novel’s best assets is Pacheco Medrano’s ability to place women at the center of Peru’s armed conflict. Indeed, Barbara is clearly one of the author’s most memorable female protagonists, a complex individual whose mysterious existence is full of trials and ordeals, as Nina will discover. While skillfully unraveling to untangle Barbara’s life story, Pacheco Medrano returns to other recurring topics of her fiction, including a voyage of introspection to confront ghosts of a painful past, the story of family sagas and their hidden secrets, and a close look at Peru’s political violence. In the end, past and present come together in this engaging narrative, along with themes such as the loss of innocence, the exploration of personal memory, and even struggles with the pandemic.

Karina Pacheco Medrano is a gifted writer whose works continue to reach a wider international readership. El año del viento is one of her best novels to date.”