The Book of Emma Reyes

Reyes's book is a collection of letters, written to a friend over thirty years and published after her death, that recount the distant years of her childhood in Colombia. Reyes became a painter in France, a friend of Sartre, Pasolini, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo, but as a child she faced almost unimaginable cruelty and deprivation, raised in squalor by a mother who then abandoned Emma and her sister to the arbitrary abuses and stern beauties of a Catholic convent. Throughout this half-unknowing ordeal—at her story's startling ending, in her early teens, she is still illiterate—Emma somehow retains her imagination and individual integrity, seeing the world with a passion and vivid, hopeful attention that hint at the life of equally unimaginable changes to follow.