Home of Her Heart

Luisa is ten when she is adopted from Colombia and taken to Canada, away from her country and her family. At seventeen, living in Toronto, she still has unanswered questions about her birth parents. Her mamá died of pneumonia, though antibiotics could have saved her, and her papá disappeared. Luisa wants to know how both of those things happened.

A family trip to Bogotá that Luisa has waited for is suddenly cancelled. She leaves Toronto without permission and goes back to the orphanage that was her last home in Colombia. She means to find answers and reach her birth family, even if it costs her the trust of her adoptive one.

The novel runs a second storyline alongside hers. At sixteen, Luisa's adopted grandmother, Nana Lottie, escapes Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport and arrives in England to wait for her parents to join her. The violence of the Shoah catches them, and they never come. Lottie loses her whole family and has to find a way to go on.

The two timelines move between Colombia and Canada, Germany and England. Grandmother and granddaughter are both survivors of state violence, and each searches for family and for a place to belong. For Luisa, that place may be Bogotá.