RIOS Y PROVINCIAS (RIVERS AND PROVINCES)

Romina Reyes' debut novel interweaves a present-day auto-fiction narrative of a young woman navigating the typical post-collegiate malaise, heartache, and questions sexual identity, with a parallel narrative that tells the story of the narrator's mother, who came of age after the Pinochet coup in 1973, and herself was plagued with similar questions of sexual identity, but against a backdrop of a militarized dictatorship.

There are two women in this story, a daughter and a mother, who have their agreements and their disagreements. Two women find themselves confronting their own epochs in Chile: Javiera, a present which is inhospitable for various reasons (she's jobless, nothing is working), and Jacqueline, her mother, the recent past - the 70s and 80s - when she was young and discovering the world. They live in an apartment in Recoleta together with Igor, father and husband, but with whom they practically never speak. Each of these women has a world the reader discovers in an intense way: Javiera suffers heartache and wanders through the gray streets of Santiago, together with a group of friends with whom she faces the difficult passage into adulthood. She doesn't speak much with her mother, either, but knows there is something uniting them both. And so she digs into her past, Jacqueline's past, to when she was younger and left after Pinochet's 1973 coup to study in Concepción while also suffering her own heartache. Two stories, two lives, unfolding across different time periods, but united by the complexities of sexual and emotional awakening, like a question without absolute answers. Rivers and Provinces, Romina Reyes's first and much-awaited debut novel, reconstructs, with fluid and multi-textured prose, the affective bonds of two generations. ROMINA REYES (Chile, 1988) is a novelist, poet, screenwriter, and journalist. She published her debut work of fiction, a collection of short stories called Reinos (Montacerdos) in 2014 and subsequently adapted it to the screen in 2017. Her debut novel,Ríos y provincias (Rivers and Provinces) was published in 2019 shortly before historic mass demonstrations in Chile and the global pandemic dominated media attention, eclipsing the novel's publication. She has also published a book of poetry, Frágil, expuesta (2022), and the zines Parecíamos eternos (We Seemed Eternal) and Privilegios y agravios de ser bisexual (The Privileges and Injustices of Being a Bisexual).