Colombian-born Santiago Martinez starts his adult life as a young gay writer living in Spain. Years later, as a university professor in New York City, Santiago is called back to his native Colombia upon the suicide of his sister. There he learns some shocking secrets about his childhood and adolescence and comes to the realization that cherished memories of the past are only illusion.

Jaime Manrique is the author of the memoir Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, the novels Latin Moon in Manhattan and Colombian Gold, and two poetry collections, My Night with Federico García Lorca and Tarzan, My Body, Christopher Columbus. He is cotranslator, with Joan Larkin, of Sor Juana’s Love Poems. He lives in New York City and is an associate professor in the MFA program at Columbia University.