When: 6:30- 7:30 PM PT on Monday, November 16, 2020
Where: Zoom Call
Tickets: https://bit.ly/3jXfDFy
On Monday, November 16, from 6:30- 7:30 PM PT, join us in conversation with Bay Area author Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Ingrid will be reading from her novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, a national bestseller and New York Times Editor Pick, followed by an interview and opportunity for audience Q&A.
THE BOOK:
A mesmerizing debut set in Colombia at the height Pablo Escobar’s violent reign about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both
Seven-year-old Chula lives in Bogotá, where the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls. Petrona, a thirteen-year old girl from the city’s guerrilla-occupied slum, moves in as her family’s live-in maid.
Chula and Petrona strike a friendship, but as both girls’ families scramble to maintain stability amidst the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula get entangled in a web of secrecy that will force them to choose between sacrifice and betrayal.
Inspired by the author’s own life, Fruit of the Drunken Tree is told through the alternating perspectives of the willful Chula and the achingly hopeful Petrona, in two different but inextricable coming-of-age stories.
In lush prose, Rojas Contreras sheds light on the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.
THE AUTHOR:
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is a Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.