La Oculta (“The Hideaway”) is the Ángels’ 150-year-old family farm in Antoquia, Colombia’s most entrepreneurial and conservative province. Mr Abad’s finely crafted novel not only expounds its narrators’ contrasting attitudes towards sex, rural life and tradition in a modernising country, but also tells in fictional form the true story of an attempt to create a rural middle class in Colombia. In doing so, it throws an evocative light on the enduring pull of the land in Latin America—and the undercurrent of violence that has gone with it.

Through a reading of Héctor Abad Faciolince’s La Oculta, the Economist examines Colombia’s rural dream and how farming is part of the region’s past and present. La Oculta is forthcoming from Archipelago Books. Read the whole piece here.