All the Names of Feliza

A woman’s fierce desire to live by her own rules exacts a tragic price, in this heart-wrenching novel by “the literary grandmaster of Colombia” (New York Review of Books)

Feliza is back in Paris, the city where decades ago she took flight into a sculptor’s life. “The first face you make is always your own,” observed her mentor at the academy there. Feliza – who as a child once escaped into the mountains north of Bogotá so she could paint them better – has never doubted the inseparability of art and self-definition. Her insistence on living by her own code has been her everything, even as it cost her a marriage, the loyalty of her parents, the custody of her daughters, and her country.

Now, in the bitter dawn of 1982, thousands of miles from home, Feliza is trying to piece life together anew, the way she fashions scrap metal into her signature sculptures. As a reunion with her old friend and fellow exile, the great Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, draws near, an apprehension grows that not even her native irreverence and ebullience can quell. What sacrifice will the world, so inhospitable to her great gift, demand next?

Inspired by the true story of a largely forgotten Colombian sculptor, All the Names of Feliza is Vásquez’s impassioned, engrossing portrayal of a woman racing, with determination and imagination equal to her art, to outstrip the forces arrayed against her.