Gloria: A Novel

Gloria: A Novel

Andrés Felipe Solano (trans. by Will Vanderhyden)

#2769 of 8,085 books · #1260 in Fiction

Shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (2025).

Centered around a real-life, historic concert at Madison Square Garden, this wide-ranging and nostalgic novel spans two continents and five decades as it charts the interlaced lives of a mother and son in New York City. It is a bright spring Saturday: April 11, 1970. The famous Argentine singer Sandro is about to become the first Latin American to perform at Madison Square Garden, and Gloria will be one of the lucky attendees at what will be a legendary concert. At just twenty years old, the young woman walks through the electric streets of New York City full of hope and possibility. The disturbing images she recently encountered at her job at a photographic laboratory, the trauma of a father who was murdered when she was a child, and even the long-term prospects of her relationship with Tigre, her irascible boyfriend, are problems for another day. This day should be perfect and should last forever. Which it will, in surprising and unexpected ways. Five decades later, Gloria's son reflects on his mother's life and realizes that their formative years—imprinted as they are by sojourns in New York at exactly the same age—are a bridge between generations that draws the pair closer through a shared sense of longing and potential. A novel of mothers and sons spanning New York City, Colombia, and Miami, Gloria is a sophisticated and daring excavation of a woman's life that asks us to consider how the choices we make in our youth reverberate throughout our possible futures.