The Long Shadow of the Hills

How Colombia’s Forgotten War Shaped a Nation and a Boy Who Returned Home

The forgotten war that shaped modern Colombia. The boy who survived it. The man who finally returns home.

In The Long Shadow of the Hills, Elena Caro delivers a sweeping narrative of love, loss, and resilience set against one of the most violent—and least understood—periods in Latin American history: La Violencia (1948–1958).

When fifteen-year-old Tomás flees his family’s coffee farm after political violence engulfs his village, he believes he is leaving his past behind. Instead, he enters a Colombia tearing itself apart—partisans in blue and red, state-backed death squads, guerrillas rising in the mountains, women building underground resistance networks, priests negotiating with killers, and children carrying lifelong scars.

Decades later, drawn back to the hills of his childhood, Tomás discovers that the land remembers everything: every wound, every whisper, every act of courage. Through his return, Caro unravels the stunning continuity between Colombia’s mid-century bloodshed and the conflicts that defined the nation for generations—from insurgencies to paramilitary wars to mass displacement.

Combining immersive storytelling, deep historical research, and emotional truth, The Long Shadow of the Hills is both a personal reckoning and a national portrait. It is a story for anyone who has fled home… and anyone who has ever had to return.

For readers of: Isabel Allende, Héctor Abad, Jon Lee Anderson, Katherine Boo, and Adam Hochschild.

Intimate. Sweeping. Unforgettable. This is the history behind the headlines—and the human heart behind the history.