Her voice is more powerful—and magical—than she ever imagined.

Consider these songs a mixtape, a disco de amor for the country I love.

May these songs find you, mis panas, wherever you are.

So you, like me, will carry Venezuela in your heart.

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Twenty songs. Twenty songs that take him back twenty years—to a country that no longer exists. Not really, anyway.

 

When Rafa gives his pregnant wife a playlist of Venezuelan music, he doesn’t know he will soon be detained by ICE. Each song pulls him back to 2007, when he worked alongside sixteen-year-old Luz Sánchez on her family’s dairy farm in rural Venezuela.

 

Luz has little patience for seventeen-year-old Rafa, who knows more about heavy metal than milking cows. Sure, their fathers are best friends, but that doesn't make Rafa family. She has learned to live with her epilepsy—until a local bruja insists her seizures are something more. Whenever Luz sings, impossible things happen: animals quiet, crowds gather, and moments tip beyond her control. When Rafa and Luz travel to a beachside quinceañera in the cacao town of Chuao, she discovers that loving out loud—in a country beginning to silence its own voices—can be as dangerous as it is necessary.

 

In the present, detained and separated from his American wife, Rafa faces deportation and the possibility of missing his child’s birth. Pressured to self-deport and return to the regime he once fled, he must decide whether to sign away his future—or fight for the chance to raise his child and pass on the songs of the homeland he lost.

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We are seeking representation for SING VENEZUELA, a complete 80,000-word upmarket novel with strong book club appeal. Told in dual POVs across two timelines, the novel follows a Venezuelan asylum seeker facing detention in the United States and the teenage girl whose voice once changed the course of his life. It blends the romantic sweep of The Stationery Shop with the diasporic family stakes of Infinite Country, bringing the political coming-of-age intensity of Libertad into an adult upmarket novel.​

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This novel was co-written by a husband-and-wife team. Our work has been published in the Hispanic literary magazine Letralia and Caracas Chronicles, the most respected English-language Venezuelan news publication.

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#Latinx #OwnVoices