Details: Product Description
Winner of The Center for Fiction’s 2021 First Novel Prize Shortlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel One of NPR’s Best Books of the Year • A Publishers Weekly and Library Journal Best Book of the Year in Fiction • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fictional Family of the Year • A Booklist Top Ten Book-Group Book of the Year • A Goodreads Choice Awards Best Debut Novel Nominee From an award-winning storyteller comes a stunning debut novel about a New Mexican family’s extraordinary year of love and sacrifice.
It’s Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother’s house, setting her life on a startling new path.
Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and disapproving Tíve, Yolanda’s uncle and keeper of the family’s history. Each brings expectations that Amadeo, who often solves his problems with a beer in his hand, doesn’t think he can live up to.
The Five Wounds is a miraculous debut novel from a writer whose stories have been hailed as “legitimate masterpieces” (New York Times). Kirstin Valdez Quade conjures characters that will linger long after the final page, bringing to life their struggles to parent children they may not be equipped to save.
Amazon.com Review
Kirstin Valdez Quade treats us to the crackling inner life and logic of each member of the Padilla family as they scrape by in a small New Mexico town: an unemployed father trying to start up a windshield repair business; his weary ex; their pregnant, hopeful teenage daughter; a handful of tios; and the paternal grandmother who holds them together while carrying her own secret. What’s thrilling and poignant is how fully absorbed they all are by the details of their own lives. Reflecting sourly on how good Jesus actually had it, Amadeo, the dad, muses that, “[r]eal suffering isn’t just about physical pain, but about not knowing when the pain will end, not knowing what the point of all of it is.” This dazzling cross-generational portrait admits the eloquence in how we disappoint ourselves and the ones we love.
—Katy Ball
Review
“Masterly… Quade has created a world bristling with compassion and humanity. The characters and the challenges they face are wholly realized and moving; their journeys span a wide spectrum of emotion and it is impossible not to root for [them].”
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Alexandra Chang, New York Times Book Review
“[A] fine-grained domestic saga… Quade is masterful with [her characters’] fragility… [A] big-hearted novel.”
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Mark Athitakis, USA Today
“Gorgeously textured… [Quade’s] sinewy sentences and emotional daring astound… Quade glides elegantly across a silken tightrope between comedy and tragedy, twists of fate that buoy her narrative to its resonant conclusion.
The Five Wounds is destined to be one of this year’s most celebrated works of fiction.”
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Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Kirstin Valdez Quade’s debut novel hooked me on page one… It’s a wholehearted, radiant, and darkly funny exploration of family, faith, and forgiveness.”
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Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed
“A gorgeously written, epic tale of one Latinx family’s via dolorosa.”
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O Magazine
“With beautifully layered relationships and an honest yet profoundly empathetic picture of a rural community―where the families proudly trace their roots back to the Spanish conquistadors while
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