A masterful novel exploring womanhood, and the ties of a middle-class, traditional life in 1970s Colombia.

“One of the hundred most influential women in the history of Colombia.”—Cromos magazine

From her home in Paris, Lina recalls the story of three women whose lives unfold in the conservative city of Barranquilla in Colombia. Amongst parties at the Country Club and strolls along the promenade in Puerto Colombia, unfurls a story of sensuality supressed by violence; a narrative of oppression in which Dora, Catalina and Beatriz are victims of a patriarchal system living in and among the fragile threads of the fabric of society. 

In Lina’s obsessive recounting of the past, this masterful novel transforms anecdotes of a life into an absolute view of the world, a profound panorama of Colombian society towards the end of the 70s.

Written from personal memories and historical research, this is a novel that is both precise and poetic, a novel that immortalises—from the distant perspective of its narrator—the events that took place in a small seaside town.

Distancing herself from her contemporaries of the Latin-American literary boom with a boldly feminist narrative, Marvel Moreno has created a world that both mirrors the close-up, private lives of the people of Barranquilla and the human condition itself.

Marvel Moreno
Marvel Moreno was born in Colombia, in 1939. As a teenager she read the great writers, including Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, who came to bear a definitive influence upon her writing. She had a close relationship with the members of the “Barranquilla Group” including Gabriel García Márquez. December Breeze was a finalist in the Plaza y Janés International Literary Prize and in 1989 she received the Grinzane-Cavour Prize. She died in 1995.