- Published: 04/06/2015
- ISBN: 9781847083470
- 129x20mm
- 320 pages
Bulletproof Vest
Maria Venegas
Maria Venegas had been estranged from her father for fourteen years when she finally made the journey back from the US to Mexico to visit him in the old hacienda where both he and she were born. As they begin spending summers and holidays together, herding cattle and fixing barbed-wire fence posts, he starts to share stories with her, tales of a dramatic life filled with both intense love and brutal violence – from the final conversations he had with his own father and his extradition from the US for murder, to his mother’s pride after he shot a man for the first time at age twelve.
In spare, gripping prose, Venegas traces her own life and her father’s through the stories she inherited from him and gradually comes to understand the violent undercurrent that has shaped them both.
£9.99
This is a contemporary corrido - a ballad of America, a lovesong of Mexico, and an intertwined family history, all brilliantly realised in sharp, precise, poetic prose
Colum McCann
Told in sparse, Spanish-infused prose, Bulletproof Vest mythologizes a family history that is compelling and impactful... Haunting
Kasia Delgado, Financial Times
Dramatic and riveting... One of the best books I've read this year
Mail on Sunday
Maria Venegas on Granta.com
In Conversation | Granta 108
Maria Venegas | Interview
Maria Venegas
Maria Venegas discusses ‘Bullet Proof Vest’, her essay from Granta 108: ‘Chicago’ about her criminal father, who ‘shot a man when he was twelve years old’.