It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression.
Julia Álvarez nació el 27 de marzo de 1950 en Nueva York. Poeta, novelista y ensayista. Nacida en Estados Unidos, pasó sus primeros años en la República Dominicana, siendo exiliada junto a su familia debido a la participación de su padre en un intento de derrocar al dictador militar Rafael Trujillo. Esta experiencia de exilio y las tensiones culturales que enfrentó al regresar a Estados Unidos, que influenciaron profundamente su obra reflejando sus propias experiencias como dominicana-americana. Aunque inicialmente estaba interesada en ...