![]() ![]() ![]() Neither of them knew their fathers, and Mauro’s mother abandoned him before he was in his teens, leaving him to grow up on the streets. The book alternates between her journey back to Bogotá - without money or a phone, sought by police, she relies on the kindness of strangers and mostly finds it - and the story of Mauro and Elena. She hasn’t seen them, except on phone screens, since she was a baby, and she’s determined to rejoin them - even though it means leaving Mauro behind in Bogotá. It’s not a long sentence, but Talia’s need to get out is urgent because she has a plane ticket to the U.S., where she was born and where her mother, Elena, and siblings Karina and Nando live. Her sentence to six months in reform school is darkly comic in a country as tortured by violence as Colombia, as her father, Mauro, points out: “a nation of amnesiacs where narcotrafficantes become senators and senators become narcotrafficantes, killers become presidents and presidents become killers.” ![]() The act is completely out of character for a girl who has spent much of her life nursing her dying, beloved grandmother. The book opens with her flight from that reform school, where she has been sent because she responded to a pointless act of cruelty with a violent act of her own. Infinite Country tells the story of Talia and her family, in Colombia and in the U.S. ![]()
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