12/12/2025
Karina Pacheco Medrano’s THE YEAR OF THE WIND, out in English with Graywolf Press (tr. Mara Faye Lethem) explores a chapter of political violence and armed conflict in Peru in a novel that is part bildungsroman and part detective novel 🎉
Nina, a Peruvian writer in Spain on the eve of the pandemic, is pulled back into her nation’s fraught history after a fleeting encounter with a woman who is a doppelgänger of Bárbara, a cousin lost to time. The games, the candor, and the secrets of her youth come alive again, but these memories are tinged with disquiet, and what unfolds takes Nina back to a village nestled in the Andes where she must confront the terrors that stalked Peru in the early 1980s. As she travels from Cusco to Apurimac to uncover Bárbara’s fate, Nina begins to weave a new cloth of memory. She learns more about Bárbara’s political radicalization and involvement with the Shining Path, the Maoist terrorist group that instigated a bloody period of political violence in which tens of thousands of mostly indigenous Peruvians disappeared or were killed.
Karina Pacheco Medrano explores how war transforms family stories and complicates the distinction between prey and hunter. Part bildungsroman, part detective novel, The Year of the Wind records a significant chapter in Peruvian history rarely considered in the literature of political violence, exploring the anonymous stories marked by horror, loss, bewilderment, and, in some cases, redemption.
Originally published in Spanish with Seix Barral and won the 2022 National Literature Prize in Peru. World English rights are with Graywolf, and all other foreign rights are free. More information: https://www.indentagency.com/el-ano-del-viento
