The Book of Emma Reyes: A Memoir - Paperback

"Startling and astringently poetic." --The New York Times

An extraordinary account, in the tradition of The House on Mango Street, Child of the Dark, and Angela's Ashes, of a Colombian woman's harrowing childhood defined by uprootedness and migration

Emma Reyes was an illegitimate child, raised in a windowless room in Bogot with no water or toilet and only ingenuity to keep her and her sister alive. Abandoned by her mother, she moved with her sister to a Catholic convent, where she scrubbed floors and mended garments for the nuns--and lived in fear of the Devil. Illiterate and knowing nothing of the outside world, she escaped at age nineteen, eventually establishing a career as an artist, befriending the likes of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera as well as European artists and intellectuals, and being encouraged in her writing by Gabriel Garc a M rquez.

Comprised of letters written over the course of thirty years, this astonishing memoir describes in painterly detail the remarkable courage and limitless imagination of a young girl growing up with nothing. Discovered only after Reyes's death, it reveals a gifted writer whose talent remained hidden for far too long.

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