Salt Crystals

Book excerpt: Five hundred miles from mainland Colombia, grassroots resistance, sloppy vacationers, and a muddy history of conquest converge for Verónica, returning after living in Mexico City, ready to understand herself and the place she came from. San Andrés rises gently from the Caribbean, part of Colombia but closer to Nicaragua, the largest island in an archipelago claimed by the Spanish, colonized by the Puritans, worked by slaves, and home to Arab traders, migrants from the mainland, and the descendants of everyone who came before. For Victoria – whose origins on the island go back generations, but whose identity is contested by her accent, her skin colour, her years far away – the sunburnt tourists, sewage blooms, sudden storms, and ‘thinking rundowns’ where liberation is plotted and dinner served from a giant communal pot, bring her into vivid, intimate contact with the island she thought she knew, her own history, and the possibility for a real future for herself and San Andrés.