Galapagos

A Novel

Fátima Vélez, Hannah Kauders

$45

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Minedition (imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc)
02 December 2025

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

From NYC-based Colombian writer Fatima Velez comes debut novel Galapagos, following a group of bohemian artists who are dying of AIDS as they embark on a surreal final voyage through the Galapagos Islands, their bodies cloaked in the skins of the dead.

From NYC-based Colombian writer Fatima Velez comes debut novel Galapagos, following a group of bohemian artists who are dying of AIDS as they embark on a surreal final voyage through the Galapagos Islands, their bodies cloaked in the skins of the dead.

Lorenzo is a painter who doesn't paint. He spends his days watching Jeanne Moreau films, luxuriating in his partner Juan B's bed, and swapping letters with his lovers. Then, one day, his nail falls off. Then another nail, then all of them. Thus begins a journey of decomposition that carries him from Colombia to Paris, from Paris to the French countryside, and on a final journey to the Galapagos Archipelago.

As they cruise the islands on a custom-made ship, Lorenzo and his friends and lovers drink, swap stories, and feast gluttonously, even as their bodies succumb to an unspeakable disease. In this contemporary plague novel, rife with pathos and humor, ailing bodies are torn between desire and decay, lust and friendship, creativity and destruction. Velez revolutionizes the novel form, pushing language to its extreme as she tests the limits of how we understand illness, sexuality, the body, and what it means to make art in the face of our own mortality.

By: Fátima Vélez, Hannah Kauders
Imprint: Minedition (imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc)
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 210mm, Width: 140mm,
Weight: 567g
ISBN: 9781662602269
ISBN 10: 166260226X
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 02 December 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Fatima Velez is a writer, professor, cultural producer, and PhD candidate in Hispano-American literature and cultures at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Galapagos is her first novel.

Reviews for Galapagos: A Novel

“Kaleidoscopically raw. A tour-de-force of interiority balanced expertly with the gruesome reality of the bodies we live within. Kauders' translation is a lesson in poetry. Prepare to be unspooled.” —Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind