The Land Stays Behind

Forthcoming 2028 from World Editions:

In this genre-defying novel, Venezuelan author Arianna de Sousa-García writes to her son about Venezuela, the land that stayed behind. Blending autobiographical memoir with the Latin American tradition of the crónica, The Land Stays Behind is an epistolary narrative chronicling the author’s own experience of exile interspersed with the stories of countless other Venezuelans facing humanitarian catastrophe. As the world tries to look away from the Venezuelan migratory crisis, de Sousa-García forces readers to bear witness in an effort to rescue these stories from oblivion. Writing from exile, living in the north of Chile, de Sousa-García blurs genres and resists a singular truth in her storytelling, an approach that reflects the diverse and real experiences of migration the book recounts. And as the novel itself migrates, beginning in Venezuela and ending in Chile, its craft transforms, a reminder that nothing and no one is left unchanged in the face of such upheaval.