Infinite Country Audiobook By Patricia Engel cover art

Infinite Country

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Infinite Country

By: Patricia Engel
Narrated by: Inés del Castillo
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About this listen

A Reese’s Book Club Pick and Instant New York Times Best Seller

Winner of the 2021 New American Voices Award, Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal, and a National Endowment of the Arts “Big Reads” Selection

“A profound, beautiful novel.” (People)

“Poignant.” (BuzzFeed)

“A breathtaking story of the unimaginable prices paid for a better life.” (Esquire)

This “heartbreaking portrait of a family dealing with the realities of migration and separation” (Time) is “a sweeping love story and tragic drama [and] an authentic vision of what the American Dream looks like in a nationalistic country” (Elle).

I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country.

Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Colombia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the United States are waiting for her. If she misses her flight, she might also miss her chance to finally be reunited with her family.

How this family came to occupy two different countries, two different worlds, comes into focus like twists of a kaleidoscope. We see Talia’s parents, Mauro and Elena, fall in love in a market stall as teenagers against a backdrop of civil war and social unrest. We see them leave Bogotá with their firstborn, Karina, in pursuit of safety and opportunity in the United States on a temporary visa, and we see the births of two more children, Nando and Talia, on American soil. We witness the decisions and indecisions that lead to Mauro’s deportation and the family’s splintering—the costs they’ve all been living with ever since.

Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engel, herself a dual citizen and the daughter of Colombian immigrants, gives voice to all five family members as they navigate the particulars of their respective circumstances. Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality of the undocumented in America, Infinite Country “is as much an all-American story as it is a global one” (Booklist, starred review).

©2021 Patricia Engel. All rights reserved. (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Family Life Fiction Latino American Literary Fiction United States Inspiring Heartfelt Thought-Provoking

Editor's Pick

An important listen about the meaning of home and family
Patricia Engel’s newest novel tells the story of a Colombian family divided between the US and Colombia due to immigration policy and the struggle of their daughter, Talia, to be reunited with her family. More than anything, Engel strives to examine the senseless nature of immigration policies, the true meaning of “home” and nationality, and the way that laws on paper have flesh-and-blood consequences. Like Talia’s family in Infinite Country, my family emigrated to the US from Bogotá when I was a young girl. Bogotá and the US have been as important parts of my life as they are Talia’s. Engel captures the experience of Bogotá exactly. From her setting descriptions to the way that each generation of Colombians relates to violence differently, listening to Infinite Country felt familiar and unknown at the same time. My family had a very easy immigration process compared to what Talia’s family faces, but key parts of their experience immediately resonated with me: her parents’ sense of otherness upon arrival, their longing for the parts of Colombia that they loved (the mountains, the myths, the movement of Bogotá), and their realization that ''no country was safer than any other''. This is a short but important listen that packs deep emotion and stinging insight into the immigrant experience in the US, into each of its four hours. —Mariana P., Audible Editor