Free Radicals

Free Radicals is the story of a girl who finds herself watching her mother run off with her lover on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The aftermath makes for the most incredible novel of our times: a saga that reconstructs over six decades in the history of Mexico, the United States, and the world, marking at least four generations. Rosa Beltrán's fascinating journey recreates events that changed history forever: the expansion of communism in Latin America, the student movements of the 1960s, the Moon landing, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Cultural and Music Revolution, the globalization of American culture, the dramatic rise of migration and domestic violence, drug trafficking, the explosion of social media, and the transformation of the middle class. Narrated in first person, from the retrospective viewpoint of the protagonist, the weaves through three generations of women, the mother, the grandmother, and the daughter and how modernity impacted their lives. Within its nearly 300 pages, the book is a work of art, a unique historical document, a poignant diary, a memoir in the voice of a woman that little by little, witnessed the transformation of her country. With a blend humor and tears, it offers profound insight into our shared experiencing as women and men, on what our parents have been through, and the events that reshaped the middle class along the most tumultuous sixty years of Western civilization. This is a book needed, that will resonate with both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking readers inviting them to understand, reflect and see with different eyes Mexico’s history and its intricate relationship with the United States.