Family Lore

Flor Marte knows exactly which day a person is going to die. At seventy, she decides to throw herself a living wake, a party to gather her family and celebrate the life she has led before whatever she has foreseen arrives. Her three sisters, Matilde, Pastora and Camila, are startled, and Flor will not say whose death the vision was of.

The wake pulls every secret in the family to the surface. Matilde has spent decades covering for a husband's infidelity and can no longer look away from it. Pastora, the most guarded of the four, throws herself into fixing her sisters' problems instead of her own. Camila, the youngest and the one everyone forgets, has stopped accepting that role.

Their daughters carry the next round of reckonings. Yadi is reuniting with the first love she lost to prison as a teenager. Ona, married for years and trying to conceive, is weighing whether to keep trying, and whether the anthropology work that once excited her still means anything.

Set over the three days before the wake, Family Lore moves between Santo Domingo and New York City and between the family's past and present. It is literary fiction told in rotating first-person voices, unhurried and interior, more interested in what each woman hides from the others than in what happens at the party itself.