Damnificados A Novel [Paperback]

Winner:
2016 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, Fiction
2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year, Multicultural Fiction
2017 Independent Publisher Book Award, Gold, Multicultural Fiction

Nominee:
2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Debut Fiction


Uses magical realism, revolutionary politics, and romantic adventure to bring to life a colorful community of squatters in an imaginary Latin American city
 
Damnificados is loosely based on the real-life occupation of a half-completed skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, the Tower of David. In this fictional version, 600 “damnificados”—vagabonds and misfits—take over an abandoned urban tower and set up a community complete with schools, stores, beauty salons, bakeries, and a rag-tag defensive militia. Their always heroic (and often hilarious) struggle for survival and dignity pits them against corrupt police, the brutal military, and the tyrannical “owners.” Taking place in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, the novel has elements of magical realism: avenging wolves, biblical floods, massacres involving multilingual ghosts, arrow showers falling to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth, and a trash truck acting as a Trojan horse.

“Should be read by every politician and rich bastard and then force-fed to them—literally, page by page.” —Jimmy Santiago Baca,author, A Place to Stand

"Extraordinary ...Damnificadosdisorients the reader by invoking biblical, mythological, epic and real-life tales in a style that is immediately gripping ... [T]here are so many genres to which JJ Amaworo Wilson gives new life in what reads like an homage to the outsiders of all places and periods ... wonderful and magical." —Gladys Marivat, Le Monde

“Two-headed beasts, biblical floods, dragonfliel3a