First published 2017
Richard Bowmaster, a 60-year-old human rights scholar, collides with Evelyn Ortega's car during a Brooklyn snowstorm. The young undocumented immigrant from Guatemala initially seems like just another minor inconvenience in his orderly academic life. But when Evelyn appears at his door desperate for help, Richard realizes their fender bender has become something far more serious. He turns to his tenant Lucia Maraz, a 62-year-old Chilean lecturer, for guidance. What begins as a crisis management situation evolves into something none of them expected. The three find themselves bound together across generational and cultural divides, their stories weaving through present-day Brooklyn back to Guatemala's recent violence and the political upheavals of 1970s Chile and Brazil. As they navigate Evelyn's predicament, Richard and Lucia discover that their own winter years might hold possibilities for connection they had long abandoned. Their partnership in helping the young woman becomes the foundation for a love story between two people who thought such chapters of their lives had closed.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century, contemporary-romance, academic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, found-family
Setting: Brazil, Brooklyn, Chile, Guatemala
Period: 1970s, 21st-century
352 pages · Hardcover · Atria Books
Content warnings: violence