Fiebre Tropical - Paperback

by Julián Delgado Lopera (Author)

Winner for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction

Winner of the 2021 Ferro-Grumley Literary Award for LGBTQ Fiction

Finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Fiction

Lit by the hormonal neon glow of Miami, this debut novel follows a Colombian teenager's coming-of-age as she plunges headfirst into lust and evangelism.

Uprooted from her comfortable life in Bogotá, Colombia, into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, fifteen-year-old Francisca is miserable and friendless in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up into an evangelical church, replete with Christian salsa, abstinent young dancers, and baptisms for the dead.

But there, Francisca also meets the magnetic Carmen: opinionated and charismatic, head of the youth group, and the pastor's daughter. As her mother's mental health deteriorates and her grandmother descends into alcoholism, Francisca falls more and more intensely in love with Carmen. To get closer to her, Francisca turns to Jesus to be saved, even as their relationship hurtles toward a shattering conclusion.

"Ebullient and assertive." --New York Times

"Julián Delgado Lopera--remember that name--is an irreverent, shameless and disarming new novelist. They are a merciless satirist in control of a pitch-perfect voice that makes an indisputable case for Spanglish as the perfect vehicle to express what we are really like right now." --NBC News

Author Biography

Julián Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer and historian based in San Francisco. Delgado Lopera is the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and the illustrated, bilingual oral history collection ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute Books 2017), which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. He is the recipient of the 2014 Jackson Literary Award, and has received fellowships from the Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The SF Grotto, and an individual artist grant from the SF Arts Commission. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Foglifter, Four Way Review, Broadly, and TimeOut Mag, among others. Delgado Lopera is formerly the creative director of RADAR Productions, a queer literary nonprofit in San Francisco.