“Colombian writer Vélez makes a striking debut with this fever dream of a novel that evokes the AIDS epidemic as it follows a group of artists and political radicals on a phantasmagoric voyage. [ . . . ] Throughout, Vélez stuns with her corporeal descriptions and baroque literary allusions. This is a knockout.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Vélez embraces the grotesquerie of decay from the very first page . . . A voyage for only the most stalwart adventurers.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Kaleidoscopically raw. A tour-de-force of interiority balanced expertly with the gruesome reality of the bodies we live within. Kauders’ translation is a lesson in poetry. Prepare to be unspooled.”
—Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
“In Galápagos, Fátima Vélez builds a verbal utopia, a dissident refuge in motion, a ship of madwomen that can only float and rise upon the waves and the hypnotic overflow of words. Here, the journey begins, leaving power and its structures ashore. Here, pus is memory, ruin is politics, and desire is a shared horizon. Here, the survivors and the dead all have a place. In this collective, anarchic, and unpunctuated flow, the expelled and wounded body becomes a deep poem, a cryptic novel, a human shield, and finally speaks—until it reaches the far shore. Strange and unsettling, dark and luminous at once in its draining of pain, Galápagos is a book of undeniable audacity and beauty.”
—Gabriela Wiener, author of Undiscovered
“A superb novel. There’s something almost jazz-like about the storytelling. Musically spectacular.”
—Lina Meruane, author of Nervous System
“There’s a sickness of the language in Galápagos that transforms its words into poetry. Its aliveness is contagious.”
—Jazmina Barrera, author of Cross-Stitch
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