Fruit of the Drunken Tree

Fruit of the Drunken Tree is the debut novel of Colombian-American author Ingrid Rojas Contreras, known for her essays and short stories which have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The LA Times Review of Books, Guernica, and others. The novel’s autobiographically-inspired plot takes place in the author’s hometown of Bogotá, and it traces the friendship of the young Chula Santiago with her family’s guerrilla-entangled maid, Petrona Sanchez. Petrona is coerced into abetting the attempted kidnapping of Chula and her sister, but she ultimately sabotages the operation in order to protect the Santiagos. Fruit of the Drunken Tree was first published in July 2018. This guide references the May 2019 Anchor Books paperback edition. Pagination may differ in the hardback or eBook editions of the text.

The novel, a dual coming-of-age story, has been described as a Bildungsroman, a nineteenth-century term for works of literary fiction that chronicle the formation of a protagonist’s world view as he or she matures from childhood into young adulthood. Rojas Contreras’s rich prose and vivid detail have inspired critics to compare her work to that of Latin American magical realists like Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez.