About the Book

Nítido Amán knows he was born in Guatemala, but he doesn’t know where, or why his family left. Raised in the United States by his immigrant parents, he never asked them about his homeland as a child—and they never talked about it. When Nítido loses his father to Alzheimer’s disease, his despondent mother, the sole bearer of a past long kept secret from her son, grows increasingly silent. Nítido realizes that his only links to the past are disappearing. So he travels to Guatemala, against his mother’s wishes, to see what he can uncover for himself.

Seeking answers, Nítido travels to Guatemala against his mother’s wishes. Upon his arrival in the small town of Río Roto, he is mistaken for the new priest, and decides to play the part. From his parishioners, he catches tantalizing and frightening glimpses of the buried history he’s aching to know. In a place shrouded in secrets, Nítido is at once determined and frightened to unearth the unnamed horrors it has seen.

About the Author

Sylvia Sellers-García was born in Boston and grew up in the United States and Central America. A graduate of Brown University and a Marshall scholar at Oxford, she has interned at Harper’s and worked at The New Yorker; her fiction has been published in StoryQuarterly. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History at the University of California, Berkeley.