Latine Author Book Cafe: "The Five Wounds"

Program Type:

Arts & Culture, Authors & Books, Equity & Anti-Racism, Multicultural

Age Group:

Adults, Older Adults
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Program Description

Latine Author Book Cafe

Join us on the second Tuesday of each month as we discuss works written by Latine authors.* Spanish language copies will be made available when possible. Learn more about library-led book discussions »

*After discussion with community members and staff, the library changed its usage from “Latinx” to “Latine.” Latine is a term created by LGBTQIA+ Spanish speakers. This term uses the letter "e" to illustrate gender inclusivity within existing Spanish pronunciation rules. It is a more inclusive term that acknowledges the gender and language diversity of the community.

Event Details

September Book Pick: The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade

From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel about a New Mexican family’s extraordinary year of love and sacrifice.

It’s Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and 33-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his 15-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother’s house, setting her life on a startling new path.

Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and disapproving Tíve, Yolanda’s uncle and keeper of the family’s history. Each brings expectations that Amadeo, who often solves his problems with a beer in his hand, doesn’t think he can live up to.

The Five Wounds is a miraculous debut novel from a writer whose stories have been hailed as “legitimate masterpieces” (New York Times). Kirstin Valdez Quade conjures characters that will linger long after the final page, bringing to life their struggles to parent children they may not be equipped to save.

About the Author
Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, which is currently shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and is longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her story collection, Night at the Fiestas, won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the American Library Association. Kirstin is the recipient of the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at Princeton.