Caroline is seven when her family flees Pinochet's regime, leaving Chile for Montreal on Christmas Eve, 1986. She fears Santa won't find them on the plane but wakes to find a new Barbie doll, her mother preserving the holiday even amidst persecution and turmoil.
Once in Canada, Caroline accompanies her parents as they clean banks at night; she experiences racist micro aggressions at school, discovers Québécois popular culture, and explores her love of reading and writing in French. Slowly, the Andean peaks disappear from her drawings. As her family increases their wealth and status--moving to a better apartment every six months in Montreal's working-class east-end neighbourhood and then a house in the suburbs--the fracture between her parents' identity and her own grows. When Caroline realizes an apartment she's partying in is one her mother cleans, the division between her parents' life and her own becomes explicitly clear.
This nuanced coming-of-age autobiographical novel probes the plurality of identity, elucidating the interwoven complexities of immigrating to a new country. As the Andes Disappeared tenderly reflects the journey of millions and is a beautiful ode to family commitment and the importance of home--however layered that may be.
About the Author: Caroline Dawson was born in Chile in 1979 and immigrated to Quebec with her family when she was seven. As the Andes Disappeared, originally published in French as Là où je me terre (2020), was a finalist for various prizes, including the Prix des libraires du Quebec and Radio Canada's Combat national des livres, and won the Prix littéraire des Collégiens and the Prix AIEQ. She is also the author of the poetry collection, Ce qui est tu (2023). Dawson teaches sociology and co-organizes the Montreal Youth Literature Festival. She lives in Montreal.
Anita Anand is an author, translator and language teacher from Montreal. She is the author of Swing in the House and Other Stories, which won the 2015 Concordia University First Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2016 Relit Award for Fiction and the Montreal Literary Diversity Prize. Her novel, A Convergence of Solitudes, was nominated for the 2022 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the 2023 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award. Her previous translations include Nirliit by Juliana Léveillé-Trudel, which was nominated for the 2018 John Glassco Prize, and Lightness by Fanie Demeule.
