Perdido

Perdido is the second book of the Guadalupe Series.

Madewell Brown walked into the village on a hot, dry day in 1946. A solitary black man with one arm longer than the other, he had never found a place for himself. Never, that is, until he had painted his own history on the interior walls of his adobe house in Guadalupe.

Fifty years later, Will Sawyer’s truck runs out of gas, and as he walks that same long road back into town he knows it’s best to keep his eyes on the ground. But he doesn’t understand the town’s long history of displacement or the difficulty of truly fitting in there, until he hears the story of the dead girl found hanging from Las Manos Bridge.

In Perdido, Collignon returns to the same magical town he first introduced in The Journal of Antonio Montoya. Once again mixing present and past, living and dead, he delivers a forthright and unflinching examination of race, belonging, and identity. With this novel, Collignon shows that a powerful new voice in American fiction has arrived.

A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García

A Santo is the third book of the Guadalupe Series.

The gentle-hearted Flavio Montoya returns, now as the aged scion of his family, still tending his sister Ramona’s fields and wondering how all of his family could have died before him. When the mountains surrounding Guadalupe erupt in flames, the history of the village seems to be set loose in the smoke. The dead arrive and the silent speak. When Flavio is accused of starting the fire that quickly threatens to consume the village, the disaster becomes one more mystery that he must fold into his own memory, though he cannot quite understand any of it.

A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García is a beautiful, funny, even epic tale of how all history is finally personal.