Books

The story I stopped keeping short.

For most of my life, "I was born during the war" was the whole sentence. This book is what happened when I finally finished it.

Cover of Ana, Hija de la Guerra by Ana Avilés — a young girl walking alone down a dirt road

Ana, Hija de la Guerra

  • Memoir
  • Spanish edition
  • English edition coming soon

Memorias de una infancia en conflicto.

A memoir of war, displacement, and the fierce, unglamorous love that carries a family through both. It's my story — and the story of the people around me who refused to be defined by what was taken from them.

An open spread of the book showing a chapter opening and an ink portrait illustration

Inside the book

Héroes anónimos

The book is built around the people history doesn't record. My father, Víctor, born in the hamlet of Los Horcones, who wanted to be a teacher so he could teach every farmer in his district to read. The neighbours who hid children. The mothers who made ordinary decisions under impossible conditions.

Each chapter opens with an ink portrait — faces rendered the way memory actually works, clear in some places and running at the edges in others.

Anonymous heroes are still heroes. Someone just has to write the names down.

Who it's for

If any of this sounds like you.

You left somewhere

And you've never quite settled the question of whether you're from where you were born or where you live now.

Your family doesn't talk about it

There's a period nobody describes in detail, and you've started to realise the silence is its own kind of story.

You want the human version

Not the geopolitics of Central America in the 1980s — the childhood inside it.

Book clubs, interviews, and events

I join book club calls when I can, and I'm available for interviews and readings. Just ask.