This World Does Not Belong to Us
SynopsisPlot
Lucas was just a child when his father sold him to another farmer as a laborer. Years later, Lucas returns, full of resentment and burning for revenge. After years away, Lucas returns uninvited to the home he was expelled from as a child. The garden has been conquered by weeds, which blanket his mother’s beloved flowerbeds and his father’s grave alike. A lot has changed since Eloy and Felisberto were invited into the family home to work for Lucas’s father, long ago. The two hulking strangers have brought the land and everyone on it under their control―and removed nuisances like Lucas. Now everything rots. Lucas, a hardened young man, turns to a world that thrives in dirt and darkness: the world of insects.
Story
About this book
Lucas was sold by his father to another farmer when he was still a child. Years later, he returns to the family home uninvited, carrying deep resentment and a desire for revenge. But the place he remembers has changed. The garden his mother once tended is overrun with weeds, his father is dead and buried beneath them, and two men named Eloy and Felisberto have taken control of the property and everyone on it. They were originally brought in as workers, but their authority has grown unchecked. The house and land are in decay.
Pushed out as a boy and unwelcome now, Lucas turns toward a world that flourishes in rot and darkness: the world of insects. Natalia García Freire, writing from Ecuador, builds a story around dispossession, land, and the slow corruption of a household. The novel traces what happens when human greed hollows out a place and the people within it, while also suggesting that something unexpected may survive in the wreckage.
The setting is rural and close to the ground, shaped by soil, overgrowth, and neglect. García Freire uses the physical landscape to carry the story's tensions, placing Lucas between a home that no longer belongs to him and a natural world that operates by its own rules.
