Description
Teeming with richly rendered human life, this kaleidoscopic New Mexico-set novel of family and community sees five generations of the Padilla clan converge after the birth of their newest member.
It’s Holy Week in the town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla is to play Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep.
Vivid, darkly funny, and beautifully rendered, spans the baby’s first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo’s mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel’s mother, whom Angel isn’t speaking to; and Tio Tive, keeper of the family’s history.
In the absorbing, realist tradition of Elizabeth Strout and Jonathan Franzen, Kirstin Valdez Quade brings to life the struggles of her characters to parent children they may not be equipped to save.
MEDIA REVIEWS
‘An unputdownable novel, The Five Wounds takes my breath away with its intimate, humorous and heart-aching portrayal of a New Mexican family. Kirstin Valdez Quade can make a reader laugh and break a reader’s heart in the same breath, and she leaves us, by the end of the novel, in awe of the dazzling power of her storytelling.’ – Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go
‘The acclaimed author of Nights at the Fiestas returns with a gorgeously written, Franzen-caliber tale of one Latinx family’s via dolorosa.’ – Oprah Magazine‘s Best Books of 2021