Description

Galápagos: A Novel

Paperback – December 2, 2025
By Fátima Vélez • Translated by Hannah Kauders

A visionary, genre-defying debut, Galápagos by Colombian writer Fátima Vélez is a haunting, corporeal, and fiercely queer meditation on art, illness, desire, and the body’s slow unmaking. Lauded by Publishers Weekly in a starred review, Vélez’s novel blends surrealism and baroque lyricism to deliver a plague narrative unlike anything else in contemporary literature.

Lorenzo is a painter who has stopped painting. He moves through life in a drifting haze—watching Jeanne Moreau films, lying in his lover Juan B’s bed, exchanging letters with his many intimates—until a single nail falls from his hand. Then another. And another. His body, once a vessel of creation, becomes a site of decay.

As Lorenzo’s illness gathers momentum, he and his circle of bohemian friends—artists, lovers, queers navigating the tender edges of desire and mortality—embark on a final odyssey across the Galápagos Archipelago. Aboard a custom-built ship, wrapped in the skins of the dead, they feast and flirt, drink and reminisce, staging one last exuberant rebellion against the disease consuming them.

Part fever dream, part elegy, part manifesto, Galápagos plunges into the tensions between eros and extinction, creativity and collapse, beauty and decomposition. Vélez pushes the novel to its limits, exploring how queer bodies hold grief, pleasure, memory, and art as they confront their own erasure.

Rendered with hallucinatory precision in Hannah Kauders’s translation, Galápagos is a stunning, unsettling, darkly luminous contribution to queer world literature.

Format: Paperback