98 Seconds Without a Shadow - Giovanna Rivero;Isabel Adey

Genoveva is sixteen. She goes to a Catholic girls’ school and lives, as she puts it, in the 'ass end of the world' – a remote town in deep Latin America, where modernization arrives hand-in-hand with drug trafficking. Between a mother lost in delusional dreams and a father clinging to the ruins of long-faded Trotskyism, Genoveva narrates her world with a voice that’s raw, contradictory, fearless, and startlingly innocent.She doesn’t like what she sees. She doesn’t like what she touches. She doesn’t like the life she has – or the one that awaits her. But from that discomfort emerges a fierce spiritual longing, a desperate urge to believe in something – anything – that might offer an escape.98 Seconds Without a Shadow is a luminous, unsettling coming-of-age novel about faith, rebellion, and the unbearable solitude of adolescence. Through Genoveva’s eyes, we glimpse a broken world where horror and hope are indistinguishable – and survival may lie in surrendering to either.

Teenage angst takes on fresh passionate, frustrated, incantatory form in Genoveva, who wants to escape not just her small town, but the limitations of human existence.