Queen Cocaine

Following the footsteps of a writer persecuted because of his ideas and tortured by his own frustrations, a young Catalan woman embarks on an adventure in the jungles of Colombia where her familiar world shatters and from which nothing emerges unharmed.

Confronted by solitude in a region where it rains incessantly, she discovers, first in her lover, then in the people around her, the alarming signs of a devastating war. In a narrative that swings between intimacy and horror, she bears witness to a hell in which she abandons everything except the language she has had to reinvent, as her only refuge, to speak about the thousand new faces death has shown her.

" . . . the Barcelona-based Catalan author brings an alien sensibility and lush, invented language to Queen Cocaine, set in Colombia's war-ravaged countryside. . . . Amat's book is a paranoid fever dream of a peasant novel--heir to those of Rulfo and Fanon, but also Lispector--filtered through the gaze of her doomed outsider."--The Village Voice

"Amat deftly conjures the funereal landscape of Colombia's Pacific coast--an indifferent sea; intemperate rains; a jungle carpeted with snakes and punctuated by swamps . . . a traumatic forced evacuation of the village near the end adds gravitas to the book, which is an acute, grimly poetic account of a South American heart of darkness."--Publishers Weekly

"A happy combination of intelligence and critical insight."--Juan Goytisolo, Times Literary Supplement"

In all, a revelatory tale that reads like the testimony of a shell-shocked survivor."--Kirkus Reviews

"[An] apocalyptic novel by Spanish writer Amat . . . A brilliant portrayal of the horrors of drug cultivation; recommended for all general collections, especially where there is an interest in Latin American culture."--Library Journal

Nuria Amat was born in Barcelona, where she now lives.