The Depulper of La Esperanza
A Novel of the Colombian Coffee Zone

About this book:

In the mist-cloaked mountains of 1932 Caldas, the harvest arrives early—and so does the machine. At La Esperanza, where sixty-one-year-old Baltasar Ochoa has spent four decades coaxing coffee from slopes so steep they swallow mules whole, the rhythm of hand and stone is about to shatter. Don Hernando, the patrón, has bought a German depulper: a beast of cast zinc and kerosene that can strip in minutes what takes a village all night. But the iron has no tongue for the bean's sweetness, no memory of the rain that raised it, and no mercy for the hands that have always known the difference.

As the first engine coughs blue smoke into the clean scent of red cherry, old alliances fray and new desperation takes root. Pickers from Pereira strip branches bare for twelve centavos an arroba. A stone mortar carved in 1898 splits clean under a twenty-pound hammer. And Baltasar—whose palms have hardened into horn, whose thumbs remember every bean he's ever turned—stands at the edge of a vanishing world, tasting the harvest in his fingers while the valley below grinds into something unrecognizable.

*The Depulper of La Esperanza* is a novel of blood and parchment, of gears that don't remember and men who cannot forget. In twenty-six chapters that pulse with the cadence of the harvest, Juan Felipe Restrepo renders a Colombia on the knife's edge of modernity—where progress smells of burnt oil, and the sweetest fruit falls first.