Invisible Years

“It’s impossible to get a singleanswer from the past. It’s not a key to anything. It’s just a place we go totrick ourselves.”

Andrea and Julin haven’t seen oneanother in twenty-one years-not since that tragic, fateful night their senioryear of high school that marked their group of friends forever. A shockingphone call brings the two together again in Houston, where they begin to unravelthe truth of that year, picking open long scabbed-over wounds from theirupper-class adolescence in 1990s Boliviaand the scandal that ripped them apart.

A writer unhappy in his career andhis marriage, Julin has been novelizing the past for his next book, trying tomake meaning out of the events that changed the course of their lives forever. “I’dthought that writing about that time would free me, relieve the burden of theinvisible years,” he writes, “but often it seems that it’s done the reverse.“Juxtaposing the nave invincibility of adolescence with the grasping uncertaintiesof adulthood, The Invisible Years deftly weaves a coming-of-age tale thatleaves the reader hanging on every word, even as they know how the cards fallin the end.

Author Biography

Rodrigo Hasbnis a Bolivian writer and screenwriter. He is the author of eight works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novelAffections(Simon & Schuster), which received an English PEN Award and has been translated into twelve languages. Named one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists in 2010, Hasbn’s short stories have appeared inGranta,McSweeney’s,Zoetrope: All-Story,Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Houston.

Lily Meyer is a translator, critic, and author of the novel Short War (Deep Vellum). A contributing writer at The Atlantic, her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird (Deep Vellum) and Ice for Martians (Columbia University Press). Her novel The End of Romance is forthcoming from Viking.