PATRICIA ENGEL
Author of
The Faraway World (Avid Reader Press, 2022)
Infinite Country (Avid Reader Press, 2021)
Veins of the Ocean (Grove, Atlantic 2016)
It's Not Love, It's Just Paris (Grove, Atlantic 2013)
Vida (Grove, Atlantic, 2010)
Winner of 2023 Jon Dos Passos Prize for Literature
Patricia Engel is the author of Infinite Country, an instant New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of the Year, Reese's Book Club pick, Esquire Book Club and Book of the Month Club pick, Indie Next pick, Amazon Best Book of the Year, named a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read, and more. Infinite Country is the winner of the New American Voices Award and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Her other books include The Veins of the Ocean, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, which won the International Latino Book Award, and of Vida, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award and the Young Lions Fiction Award; winner of a Florida Book Award, International Latino Book Award and Independent Publisher Book Award, longlisted for the Story Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. For Vida, Patricia was the first woman to be awarded Colombia’s national prize in literature, the 2017 Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana.
She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, and Key West Literary Seminar among others, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Award.
Patricia's books have been translated into many languages. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, A Public Space, Ploughshares, The Sun, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Catapult, and in numerous anthologies.
Born to Colombian parents, Patricia is a graduate of New York University and earned her MFA at Florida International University. She is an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami.
BOOKS BY PATRICIA
The Faraway World (Avid Reader Press, forthcoming)
LitHub’s 38 Best Books We Read in 2023
Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Fiction
Boston Globe’s Best Books to Read in 2023
Today Show’s 42 Standout Books from 2023
From Patricia Engel, whose novel Infinite Country was a New York Times bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick comes an exquisite collection of ten haunting, award-winning short stories set across the Americas and linked by themes of migration, sacrifice, and moral compromise.
Two Colombian expats meet as strangers on the rainy streets of New York City, both burdened with traumatic pasts. In Cuba, a woman discovers her deceased brother’s bones have been stolen, and the love of her life returns from Ecuador for a one-night visit. A cash-strapped couple hustles in Miami, to life-altering ends.
The Faraway World is a collection of arresting stories from the New York Times–bestselling author of Infinite Country, Patricia Engel, “a gifted storyteller whose writing shines even in the darkest corners” (The Washington Post). Intimate and panoramic, these stories bring to life the liminality of regret, the vibrancy of community, and the epic deeds and quiet moments of love.
PRAISE
“A pleasure to read... Engel's multinational update of dirty realism is full of ironic flair, imagination, and empathy.” — Kirkus Reviews (Starred)
“Engel's in fine form in all the short stories, as she examines the intersections of class, immigration, and families.” —Town & Country
"[An] engrossing collection... Engel’s alluring story lines and empathy for her characters make this a winner." —Publishers Weekly
“Patricia Engel's ten short stories are narrated by plucky, imperfect characters who weigh up wealth and piety as they contemplate their chances in their homeland or abroad.” —Shelf Awareness
"Any fan of Engel’s work will tell you to prepare yourself for unique and intimate layered storytelling. You'll find that and so much more in this new short story collection exploring themes of community, regret and migration." —TODAY
"These 10 compelling stories follow characters that feel as real as I do, grappling with human struggles that feel both uniquely new and nearly universal. If you're looking for a collection that will touch your heart and make you look at your fellow humans more generously, this one's a can't-miss." —Good Housekeeping
“A haunting read... No matter how far these stories travel, Engel infuses intimacy and care in every single life she writes.” —Chicago Review of Books
“When you’re in a dark place, you just want someone next to you with a (proverbial) flashlight, holding your hand. Patricia Engel does that in this evocative collective featuring Colombians and Colombian expats teetering on the line between despair, and resilience.” —Erin Kodicek, Amazon Best of the Month pick
Infinite Country (Avid Reader Press, 2021)
A New York Times and Washington Post Bestseller
Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club Pick
Book of the Month Club Pick
IndieNext Pick
At the dawn of the new millennium, Colombia is a country devastated by half a century of violence. Elena and Mauro are teenagers when they meet, their blooming love an antidote to the mounting uncertainty of life in Bogotá. Once their first daughter is born, and facing grim economic prospects, they set their sights on the United States.
They travel to Houston and send earnings back to Elena’s mother, all the while weighing whether to risk overstaying their tourist visas or to return to Bogotá. As their family expands, and they move again and again, their decision to ignore their exit dates plunges the young family into the precariousness of undocumented status, the threat of discovery menacing a life already strained. When Mauro is deported, Elena, now tasked with caring for their three small children, makes a difficult choice that will ease her burdens but splinter the family even further.
Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engel, herself the daughter of Colombian immigrants and a dual citizen, gives voice to Mauro and Elena, as well as their children, Karina, Nando, and Talia—each one navigating a divided existence, weighing their allegiance to the past, the future, to one another, and to themselves. Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality for the undocumented in America, Infinite Country is the story of two countries and one mixed-status family—for whom every triumph is stitched with regret and every dream pursued bears the weight of a dream deferred.
PRAISE
“Engel’s sweeping novel gives voice to three generations of a Colombian family torn apart by man-made borders... Gorgeously woven through with Andean myths and the bitter realities of undocumented life, Infinite Country tells a breathtaking story of the unimaginable prices paid for a better life.”
—Esquire
“At once a sweeping love story and tragic drama, Infinite Country… promises to deliver what American Dirt could not: an authentic vision of what the American Dream looks like in a nationalistic country.”
—Elle
"Clear, moving, and perfectly calibrated, Infinite Country follows the members of one mixed-immigration status family as they navigate dreams, distance, and the bonds of love and memory. Patricia Engel is a stunning writer with astonishing talents."
—Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers
"Engel's vital story of a divided Colombian family is a book we need to read… The rare immigrant chronicle that is as long on hope as it is on heartbreak.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Veins of the Ocean (Grove, Atlantic 2016)
The extraordinary new novel from award-winning author, Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean is a heartrending story of one woman’s devotion to her death row-convicted brother and her journey away from a painful past.
Reina Castillo is the alluring young woman whose beloved brother is serving a death sentence for a crime that shocked the community, throwing a baby off a bridge–a crime for which Reina secretly blames herself. With her brother’s death, though devastated and in mourning, Reina is finally released from her prison vigil. Seeking anonymity, she moves to a sleepy town in the Florida Keys where she meets Nesto Cadena, a recently exiled Cuban awaiting with hope the arrival of the children he left behind in Havana. Through Nesto’s love of the sea and capacity for faith, Reina comes to understand her own connections to the life-giving and destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds her as well as its role in her family’s troubled history, and in their companionship, begins to find freedom from the burden of guilt she carries for her brother’s crime.
Set in the vibrant coastal and Caribbean communities of Miami, the Florida Keys, Havana, Cuba, and Cartagena, Colombia, with The Veins of the Ocean Patricia Engel delivers a profound and riveting Pan-American story of fractured lives finding solace and redemption in the beauty and power of the natural world, and in one another.
Praise
“Engel has an eye for detail. She knows how to drown the reader in a sense of enchantment. . .will She writes exquisite moments.“
—Roxane Gay, The Nation“In a novel that is vitally relevant today when the word refugee has such loaded connotations, Engel delivers a pulsating . . . and deeply introspective take on how family, love, and guilt can both 'chain us together' and set us free.“
—Booklist, starred review“Engel is able to find a lightness in a disturbing story to carry the reader through the novel. But this effervescent, breezy voice does jar, at times, with dark subject matter. Still, Engel has crafted a detailed, rich world of vivid atmosphere and imagery . . . A dark comedy with unexpected heart.“
—Kirkus Reviews
It's Not Love, It's Just Paris (Grove, Atlantic 2013)
Patricia Engel’s collection of stories, VIDA, quickly established her as one of our country’s best young writers, winning praise from Junot Díaz, Uzodinma Iweala, Francisco Goldman, and others. Her first novel is a vibrant and wistful narrative about an American girl abroad in Paris, who navigates the intoxicating and treacherous complexities of independence, friendship, and romance.
Lita del Cielo, the daughter of two Colombian orphans who arrived in America with nothing and made a fortune with their Latin food empire, has been granted one year to pursue her studies in Paris before returning to work in the family business. She moves into a gently crumbling Left Bank mansion known as “The House of Stars,” where a spirited but bedridden Countess Séraphine rents out rooms to young women visiting Paris to work, study, and, unofficially, to find love.
Cautious and guarded, Lita keeps a cool distance from the other girls, who seem at once boldly adult and impulsively naïve, who both intimidate and fascinate her. Then Lita meets Cato, and the contours of her world shift. Charming, enigmatic, and weak with illness, Cato is the son of a notorious right-wing politician. As Cato and Lita retreat to their own world, they soon find it difficult to keep the outside world from closing in on theirs. Ultimately Lita must decide whether to stay in France with Cato or return home to fulfill her immigrant family’s dreams for her future.
It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris is a spellbinding love story, a portrait of a Paris caught between old world grandeur and the international greenblood elite, and an exploration of one woman’s journey to distinguish honesty from artifice and lay claim to her own life.
Praise
“Wise and accomplished . . . Beautifully written and executed . . . There are at least two ways to judge a novel: by how fast you turn the pages or by how many times you have to stop to underline a passage. My copy of “It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris” is all marked up. Engel, whose first book was the acclaimed story collection, “Vida,” has uncanny insight into the human condition. Through Lita, she speaks a profound language of young love and desire. Engel’s considerable gifts are on display here.”
– The New York Times Book Review“In Patricia Engel’s absorbing debut novel, It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, she writes a unique child-of-immigrants story and, in turn, creates a literature of her own. The novel is intimate in scope, erotic and, by the end, entirely unexpected. Engel meticulously chronicles the decadence of youth abroad. There is also immense tenderness in It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris. The power of this excellent novel is in how Engel holds us in her thrall as she complicates where Lita is going and what she will leave behind. The heart this story breaks, might be your own.”
–Roxane Gay, The Nation“Distills the essence of the immigrant experience. [Articulates] that trying to start a life in a strange land is an artistic feat of the highest order, one that ranks with (or perhaps above) our greatest cultural achievements.”
– The Atlantic
Vida (Grove, Atlantic, 2010)
Winner of an Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal for Literary Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Editors' Choice
A NPR Best Debut of the Year
Finalist for The New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, and Paterson Fiction Prize
Longlisted for The Story Prize
A Latina Magazine Best Book of the Year
A LA Weekly Top Book of the Year
Winner of the Florida Book Awards Silver Medal for General Fiction
Fresh, accomplished, and fearless, VIDA is the distinct and daring debut by award-winning writer Patricia Engel.
In “Lucho,” Sabina’s family—already “foreigners in a town of blancos”—is shunned by the community when a relative commits an unspeakable act of violence, but she is in turn befriended by the town bad boy who has a secret of his own; in “Desaliento” Sabina surrounds herself with other young drifters who spend their time looking for love and then fleeing from it—until reality catches up with one of them; and in “Vida,” the urgency of Sabina’s self-imposed exile in Miami fades when she meets an enigmatic Colombian woman with a tragic past.
Patricia Engel maps landscapes both actual (New Jersey, New York, Miami, Bogota) and interior in this stunning debut, and the constant throughout is Sabina—serious, witty, alternately cautious and reckless, open to transformation yet skeptical of its lasting power. Infused by a hard-won, edgy wisdom, Vida introduces a sensational new literary voice.
Praise
“The stories in Patricia Engel’s striking debut collection are like snapshots from someone’s photo album: glimpses of relatives, friends, lovers and acquaintances, sometimes posing, sometimes caught by the camera unawares. What makes Sabina’s coming-of-age story so compelling is the arresting voice Ms. Engel has fashioned for her: a voice that’s immediate, unsentimental and disarmingly direct. Ms. Engel proves as adept at depicting the staid, highly class-conscious world of Sabina’s relatives in Bogotá, as she is at capturing the artsy downtown world of New York, and the Miami club scene. She also delineates Sabina’s efforts to articulate an identity of her own — through her relationships with her family and the men she dates — with unsparing psychological precision.”
– Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times“Vida’s nine dazzling stories seduce the senses and bind the heart, casting a charged light on second generation Latina experience and redefining American coming-of-age in Sabina’s unforgettable voice. Patricia Engel is a master stylist whose relentless dance through language and flawless, controlled rhythms never abandon story itself. She is an original, and Vida marks an astonishing debut.”
– PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award Citation“Gloriously gifted and alarmingly intelligent, Patricia Engel writes with an almost fable-like intensity, whether she is describing suburban New Jersey or urban Colombia or some other lost place . . . her ability to pierce the hearts of her crazy-ass characters, to fracture a moment into its elementary particles of yearning, cruelty, love, and confusion will leave you breathless. Here, friends, is the debut I have been waiting for.”
– Junot Dίaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao