River-novel. Beginning-novel. Mantra-novel. The first work by Albalucía Ángel is a torrential and luminous experience, a life-chant howled with an open chest—from Paris, Rome, the Greek islands, and Venus—by a young Albalucía Ángel, future titan of Colombian literature and spiritual mother of the new boom written by women.

Published in 1968 and unpublished until now in Spain, the reissue of Los girasoles en invierno represents the vindication of a fundamental author for understanding the later evolution of Latin American narrative; a precursor with irreverent technique in which life and work merge in telepathic connection to find their own voice.

Ángel writes to live, and lives to write, mapping the charts of a still unexplored territory: where the real and the imagined, the biographical and the literary, know no distinctions or borders.

Who cared about what one could become? A sack of bones, worm food, anything. Today her skin, her cellular makeup, her brain, the sensation of wine running through her body answered only the one valid question: am I alive…?