The Angel of Galilea

Laura Restrepo's prize-winning The Angel of Galilea, newly translated into English, is a sublimely original, utterly contemporary story of love, faith, poverty, and mystery.

Mona, a Colombian journalist once idealistic and determined to better the world, has been reduced to recounting the vapid pronouncements of newly crowned beauty queens for the tabloid journal that employs her. When her editor sends her to investigate reported sightings of an angel in a barrio on the outskirts of Bogotá, it's just another day's work. The angel craze has arrived late from America, and true to Colombian fashion she will now be expected to "warm up another topic already cold in the U.S."

When she arrives in the flooded poorest-of-the-poor barrio of Galilea, she finds the residents in passionate conflict over a strange but beautiful young man. Magnificent, overwhelming, enigmatic, and possessing an undeniable sexual magnetism, he is revered by some as an angel and denounced by others, including the local priest, as an infernal impostor. Mona reads the story of this "angel without a name" in tattered journals transcribed by his mother and communes silently with him in the moonlight, falling deeply, passionately in love with him. Risking all, she commits herself to saving him from the forces that would destroy him.

This silent, powerful angel, left out of the official heavenly host, personifies for the outcast, impoverished residents of Galilea their faith and hope. For Mona he is the avatar of a mystery she abandoned in childhood and, in a single, passionate, intimate embrace, fulfills both her desire to love completely and her longing to believe.

The Angel of Galilea has been awarded the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in Mexico and the Prix France Culture in France.