Year of the Wind

The Year of the Wind follows Nina, a Peruvian writer based in Spain, whose life is upended just before the COVID-19 pandemic by a fleeting encounter with a woman who looks exactly like her cousin Bárbara — a cousin Nina hasn't seen in forty years and believed dead. When the stranger reveals that Bárbara is, in fact, alive rather than living quietly in Brazil as her family always claimed, Nina begins retracing her cousin's path from Cusco to the rural province of Apurímac.

The search becomes an excavation of Bárbara's political radicalization during the years of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the Maoist insurgency that killed and disappeared tens of thousands of mostly Indigenous Peruvians in the 1980s and '90s. Nina reconstructs fragments of memory alongside letters Bárbara received from a mysterious suitor before she left for a remote teaching post — clues that lead Nina down an increasingly consuming search for both the suitor's identity and the truth of what happened to her cousin.

Part bildungsroman and part detective story, Karina Pacheco Medrano's novel — her first to appear in English, translated by Mara Faye Lethem — treats Peru's internal conflict through one family's private history rather than through the more familiar frame of state or guerrilla violence, tracing how political terror reshapes memory across generations.