The Five Wounds: A Novel

Written by Kirstin Valdez Quade

Narrated by Gary Tiedemann

It's Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With weeks to go until her due date, tough, ebullient Angel has fled her mother's house, setting her life on a startling new path.

Vivid, tender, funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the baby's first year as five generations of the Padilla family converge: Amadeo's mother, Yolanda, reeling from a recent discovery; Angel's mother, Marissa, whom Angel isn't speaking to; and disapproving Tive, Yolanda's uncle and keeper of the family's history. Each brings expectations that Amadeo doesn't think he can live up to.

The Five Wounds is a miraculous debut novel from a writer whose stories have been hailed as "legitimate masterpieces" (New York Times). Kirstin Valdez Quade conjures characters that will linger long after the book's conclusion, bringing to life their struggles to parent children they may not be equipped to save.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781696603515

Kirstin Valdez Quade

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of Night at the Fiestas, winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. The recipient of a "5 Under 35" award from the National Book Foundation, she teaches at Princeton University.

Reviews for The Five Wounds

[Sasha Young · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a beautifully written book with the same anxieties that life bestows us with wonderful relationships and heartbreak.
It was also one of the best narrations I've ever heard.
So it was easy to listen every word.

[Jazsper Ford · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I liked all the characters. I felt like I got to know them all so well and could almost predict how they would react to certain situations. Great read.

[Raha Respina · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Breathtakingly sad, dark and accurate in each and every detail on the family dynamics. Right at the moment that you expected something good to happen it disappoints as life does.