Our Lady of the Assassins
SynopsisPlot
Our Lady of the Assassins by Fernando Vallejo tells the story of a middle-aged writer who returns to Medellín and begins a relationship with a young hitman, witnessing firsthand the violence, despair, and fleeting tenderness of a city consumed by drug wars. Through stark, confessional prose, the novel portrays both personal intimacy and the brutal social realities of Colombia in the 1990s.
Story
About this book
Our Lady of the Assassins follows Fernando, an aging writer who returns to his hometown of Medellín, Colombia, after years away. The city he knew has been reshaped by the drug trade, and its streets are marked by poverty, addiction, and routine killings. Fernando begins a relationship with Alexis, a teenage sicario, a hired killer working in the city's violent underworld. Through their time together, the novel maps a Medellín where churches sit alongside open gunfire and where affection and danger occupy the same rooms.
Fernando Vallejo writes in a confessional, direct style, placing his narrator's voice close to the chaos around him. The prose moves between tenderness and blunt descriptions of death, refusing to soften either. Medellín itself functions almost as a character, with its hillside comunas, its basilicas, and its overcrowded barrios shaping every scene. The story addresses the social fractures of Colombia during the 1990s, when cartel violence had become part of daily life for many residents.
After Alexis is killed, Fernando's search through the city's slums draws him toward another young man, Wilmar, who bears a resemblance to Alexis. This second relationship deepens the novel's attention to cycles of loss and repetition in a place where violence has become ordinary.
