Memory, Land, and the Stories That Carry Us
Fiction and essays at the intersection of Colombia, diaspora, and the Pacific Northwest
No other author writes from Ricardo Gómez's specific place: a writer born in Canada, raised in Colombia, shaped by nearly two decades in Seattle, and now writing from Port Townsend at the edge of the Pacific. These books move between Bogotá and the Pacific Northwest, between the violence of the past and the possibility of the present. They are about what we carry when we leave home, what we find when we arrive somewhere new, and what it means to belong — irrevocably — to more than one place.
The borrachero is Colombia's most legendary plant — beautiful, toxic, mythologized, capable of making you see visions or lose your will entirely. It is also the perfect symbol for the creative life: intoxicating, dangerous, and impossible to resist.
This novel traces three generations of a Colombian family whose lives are shaped by art, migration, and the perpetual search for belonging. It begins in 1900 with Richard, a defiant young Colombian artist, and his wife Tita — together building a successful art business amid political turmoil, eventually carrying it north to Canada. Their son Rigo returns to Colombia in the 1950s as an engineer, and his wife Yayo juggles creativity, personal aspirations, and family life as they move between Bogotá and Canada. The third generation brings their son Ricky — into art, revolution, and professional work across multiple countries — and his wife Lee, navigating the contemporary pressures of professional and family life in the United States in the 2000s.
Across a century and three countries, the novel asks what survives migration: what is carried, what is lost, what is transformed beyond recognition. Don Quixote runs as a quiet thread throughout — the idealism of people who keep tilting at windmills across generations — while the Borrachero Tree itself stands for the blend of inspiration and danger that runs through every creative life. Inspired by the author's own family history, rendered as fiction.
English & Spanish · Three generations · Colombia, Canada, United States
Kindle EN $7.99 · Paperback EN $15.99 → https://mybook.to/UnderBorrachero
Kindle ES $7.99 · Paperback ES $20.00 · Audiobook → https://mybook.to/BajoElBorrachero
The Weight of Choosing (English) -- Six Latino friends in their sixties watch their aging parents navigate the final chapters of life and discover that the hardest conversations are the ones that matter most. A Cuban-American therapist who can't help her own mother. A Mexican engineer whose solutions can't fix his father's failing heart. A Colombian architect unable to blueprint her way through grief. A Salvadoran executive treating her father's Alzheimer's like a business problem. As each friend confronts impossible choices between honoring cultural traditions and accepting American healthcare realities, they form an unlikely death-with-dignity pact — learning that planning for death isn't about giving up. It's about choosing how to love. Set in contemporary San Diego, spanning three generations.
El Peso de Elegir (Spanish) — Cuando Esperanza, una psicóloga bogotana de 63 años, encuentra a su madre perdida en las calles de Chapinero, se da cuenta de que todas sus herramientas profesionales no la prepararon para ser simplemente una hija enfrentando lo inevitable. En el mismo momento, por toda Bogotá, otros profesionales exitosos descubren que su expertise no los protege del dolor más universal: ver envejecer y morir a quienes aman. Carlos Alberto, un ingeniero que siempre encontró soluciones técnicas, se enfrenta a un padre que rechaza la cirugía cardíaca. Ana, una arquitecta acostumbrada a controlar cada detalle, debe aceptar que su madre elige cuidados paliativos. Lo que comienza como una serie de crisis familiares separadas se transforma en algo extraordinario: un grupo de apoyo que se reúne cada miércoles, donde profesionales acostumbrados a arreglar problemas aprenden el arte más difícil de todos — acompañar sin controlar, amar soltando. Una novela profundamente colombiana sobre el "Pacto de los Ochenta" y cómo vivir plenamente cuando aceptamos que la vida tiene límites.
Spanish set in Bogotá · English set in San Diego · Two novels, one conversation about mortality Para lectores de Isabel Allende y Héctor Abad Faciolince · For readers of Being Mortal and Crying in H Mart
Kindle ES $5.99 · Paperback ES $11.99 → https://mybook.to/PesoDeElegir
Kindle EN $6.99 · Paperback EN $12.99 → https://mybook.to/WeightOfChoosing
Three novellas, each narrated by a ten-year-old navigating a world larger and more dangerous than adults want to admit. Together they form a meditation on what children carry — and what they pass on — when the ordinary world reveals its hidden architecture of resistance, loss, and inheritance.
Whispering Threads / Hilos que Susurran In a household shadowed by a father who works for a repressive municipal office, young Marcela discovers that her mother's old Singer sewing machine carries a quiet ancestral wisdom. Through whispered lessons in stitches — three for strength, seven for safe passage, nine for secrets — she learns how women in their community sew protection into ordinary garments. As neighbors begin to disappear, her mother Inés joins a hidden network of seamstresses encoding escape routes into wedding dresses, communion clothes, and everyday mending. When violence erupts at home, the family flees in the night guided by maps hidden in silk. In exile, the absence of the Singer feels like the loss of a living guardian — yet its teachings remain in their hands. A story about how domestic craft becomes quiet defiance, and how mothers pass on both skill and courage stitch by stitch.
The River's Time / El Tiempo del Río After the death of their grandmother Elena, Sofía and her family discover that the quiet farm woman who painted modest watercolors was also Isabel Río — an internationally recognized artist who secretly sold work to sustain the family farm for decades. Gallery owners and art experts descend on their rural kitchen, turning private grief into public scrutiny. Sofía watches her mother juggle herbs for market with contracts and authentication papers, while her younger brother Miguel begins drawing images that eerily echo their grandmother's hidden vision. A mysterious Aleph above the kitchen door suggests that art, land, and time are braided together across generations. When experts uncover decades of secret exhibitions, the family must decide how to honor both identities: the grandmother who loved the soil and the artist who navigated the global art world.
A Different Game / Un Juego Diferente In a world organized entirely around winning — in school, sports, and social standing — a young narrator initially accepts the rules, believing achievement must come at someone else's expense. As tensions rise, the cracks become visible: small acts of exclusion, quiet compromises, the ease with which people trade integrity for advantage. Gradually, inspired by those who refuse to play by harsh rules, the narrator imagines another way forward — grounded in cooperation rather than conquest. The story closes not with a trophy but with a shift in perspective: a choice to redefine success as shared growth and the courage to step outside a rigged system. In doing so, the protagonist discovers that changing the game can matter more than winning it.
Spanish & English · Audiobook available
Kindle ES · Paperback → https://mybook.to/HilosInvisibles
Kindle EN · Paperback · Audiobook → https://mybook.to/ThingsWeCarry
In 2021, three researchers arrive in Colombia's Vaupés region expecting to conduct participatory research with Indigenous communities. They carry sophisticated methodologies, institutional support, and good intentions. What they don't expect is that the communities have been managing researchers for decades — and have developed their own sophisticated strategies for protecting what matters while satisfying institutional demands. Over five years, Carlos translates between Spanish, Cubeo, and English, calculating what the collaboration costs him: 28.8 million pesos in foregone income. Paloma writes two versions of her dissertation — one publishable, one honest. Gabriel repairs the satellite phone seven times, learning that partnership means showing up when technology fails, not documenting success. And Don Florentino teaches traditional governance without salary while his grandson Tomás faces the choice he's been preparing for since age twelve: which knowledge system to keep, which to abandon. Based on actual participatory research in Colombia's Vaupés region, this novel makes visible what academic papers cannot capture — the humor during technology failures, the frustration when rhetoric advances faster than structural change, and the care expressed through equipment repair. Five years proved convergence possible and revealed current institutional structures make it economically unsustainable. Both remain true.
For readers interested in Indigenous knowledge systems, collaborative research ethics, and stories about humans navigating impossible situations with humor and commitment.
English · Literary fiction · Audiobook available
Kindle $9.99 · Paperback $20.00 · Audiobook → https://mybook.to/RiversThatConverge
En 1977, en un pueblo atravesado por un río que divide clases y destinos, una joven archivista desaparece después de descubrir pruebas de despojo de tierras. Su investigación queda inconclusa. Sus documentos, dispersos. Su nombre, borrado de los registros oficiales. Casi cincuenta años después, su historia reaparece en manos de Carolina Martínez, una investigadora que hereda no solo cajas de papeles, grabaciones y fotografías, sino una pregunta incómoda: ¿qué hacer con una verdad que fue guardada para sobrevivir? Una novela coral narrada por mujeres que documentan, enseñan, marcan paredes, esconden archivos y esperan — recorriendo varias generaciones unidas por un mismo gesto: conservar pruebas cuando decir la verdad podía costar la vida. Esta novela funciona como novela previa a El Otro Lado del Río, ampliando el origen de los conflictos, los territorios y las historias que reaparecen en esa obra. Puede leerse de forma independiente, pero dialoga directamente con ella.
Spanish · Novela coral · Prequel to El Otro Lado del Río
Para lectores de Isabel Allende, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Laura Restrepo.
Kindle · Paperback → https://mybook.to/MarcasNoSeBorran
Esteban Ibáñez hereda un lote de su madre en Monteluce, el sector élite de Cajibó. Cuando decide vendérselo a Camilo Barreto, un constructor proveniente de La Pedriza — el barrio popular al otro lado del río — reactiva una división de cincuenta años. Dos hombres que cargan silencios: Esteban fue guerrillero en los ochenta, presenció violencia, desertó, nunca testimonió en la JEP. Camilo sirvió en la Armada destruyendo casas de civiles en operaciones antidroga. Tampoco habló ante la Comisión de la Verdad. Ambos intentan ahora su propia forma de reparación — construir algo juntos. La familia de Esteban lo acusa de traicionar su clase. La comunidad de Camilo lo ve como un desertor. El puente que construyen no cruza a todos. No resuelve todo. Pero existe. Y en un país que lleva décadas intentando cerrar heridas, eso es significativo. Una novela necesaria para la Colombia post-acuerdos — sobre cómo se construye la paz en lo cotidiano, cuando los procesos oficiales no alcanzan.
Spanish · Colombia contemporánea · Dialoga directamente con Las Marcas No Se Borran
Ideal para lectores de Evelio Rosero, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Juan Gabriel Vásquez.
Kindle · Paperback → https://mybook.to/ElOtroLadoDelRio
Bogotá, 2025. Six former teachers from the prestigious Colegio San Telmo gather for the first time in four decades, summoned by the death of Aurelio — the seventh member of their group — who left behind a posthumous novel that none of them dares to read. Over a night that stretches until dawn, Abelardo, Helena, Santiago, Beatriz, Emigdio, and Camilo relive the "golden years" of the mid-1980s, when they were young idealist teachers in an elite school — teaching brilliant, arrogant boys, sons of Bogotá's upper class, in a garden where Japanese umbrellas bloomed and the rain destroyed them again and again.
But the memories are not as luminous as they'd like. The conversation drifts into uncomfortable territory: Padre Otto and the rumors never investigated. Felipe Ordóñez and his suicide years later. The signals they ignored. The questions they never asked. The shared guilt of having left — chasing revolutions and utopias — abandoning the students who needed them most. Meanwhile Abelardo keeps a secret that could change everything: twenty-three letters from seventeen former students, written over four decades, proving that those years did matter. Letters from an economist who learned to read between the lines, a doctor who found hope in the law of large numbers, an engineer who recovered his lost passion. But showing them would mean admitting they did something valuable — and if it was valuable, then leaving was unforgivable.
A choral novel about the contradictions of the teaching vocation, the paradoxes of privilege, and the impossibility of knowing whether our decisions were right until it is too late.
Kindle · Paperback → https://mybook.to/LosQueSeFueron
Roberto and Marianne Castellanos are celebrating their fifteenth wedding anniversary with a week in Paris — their first return since their chaotic honeymoon with all five children from their blended family. Roberto has just retired from teaching literature. Marianne retired early after a hiking accident changed how she sees the world through her camera lens. They're no longer the overwhelmed parents managing teenagers in the Louvre. But who are they now?
As they retrace their steps through the Latin Quarter, an extraordinary thing begins to happen. The fictional characters from Julio Cortázar's legendary novel Hopscotch — La Maga, Horacio Oliveira, and the mysterious child Rocamadour — start appearing in the streets of Paris. Only Roberto and Marianne can see them, one character a day, each one challenging the couple to examine their marriage, their relationship to aging, and what it means to truly inhabit a life rather than merely document or analyze it.
Like Cortázar's masterpiece, The Paris Game can be read two ways: sequentially for a complete, satisfying story, or following an embedded Anniversary Game navigation that reveals additional chapters exploring family history, creative awakenings, and the magical objects that witness long marriages. A love letter to Latin American literature, to the pleasures of long partnership, and to the magic that emerges when we remain open to wonder.
Literary fiction with magical realism · English & Spanish
[Kindle EN $5.99] [Paperback EN $12.99] [Audiobook] https://mybook.to/ParisGame
[Kindle ES $5.99] [Paperback ES $14.99]
[Audiobook] https://mybook.to/JuegoDeParis
After a stroke, Elena Arteaga enters a Bogotá hospital and discovers she is not alone. In its corridors, waiting rooms, and operating theaters live the people the system has discarded: those who died waiting for care, patients erased by bureaucracy, physicians broken by the machinery of healthcare administration. All of them marked by the clinical codes that reduce entire lives to initials and numbers.
A novel that crosses medical realism with the fantastical, social critique with family intimacy. Through a woman artist who learns to see the invisible, it exposes the everyday violence of healthcare systems and the human cost of institutional negligence — and asks how love persists even as memory unravels. For readers who want fiction that does what political analysis cannot: show what it feels like from the inside when the unthinkable becomes routine.
Literary fiction with magical realism · Spanish ·
[Kindle $5.00] [Paperback $9.99] [Audiobook]
https://mybook.to/OtrosDelirios
Óscar Cásares · Cristina García · Edwidge Danticat · Juan Gabriel Vásquez · Piedad Bonnett
© Ricardo Gómez · ricardogomez.net [Books] [About] [Amazon Author Page] [Substack: substack.com/@storiesacrossborders100]
"Stories that cross borders, centuries, and ways of knowing."