First published 2014
Antonio Yammara encounters a newspaper story about a hippo that broke free from Pablo Escobar's abandoned zoo. The article pulls him back to the violent years when the Medellín cartel battled government forces across Colombia. During that time, Antonio watched his friend die, a killing that still torments him. He begins digging into the murder and uncovers how the drug war scarred both his own life and his dead friend's family. His search takes him decades into the past, to the 1960s, before cocaine trafficking consumed an entire generation. Through his investigation, Antonio confronts how his country's brutal recent history shaped everyone who lived through it. The novel examines how violence echoes through time and connects individual lives to national trauma.
Genres: fiction, historical-fiction, crime, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: investigation, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Colombia, Medellín
Period: 1960s, 2000s
302 pages · Hardcover · Riverhead Books
Content warnings: violence