1990s Baranquilla, where the streets flood whenever it rains. There are fires, the river stinks, and people disappear without a trace. At school, a gang of teenage girls, Los Perros, inaugurates new members with increasingly extreme pranks each time one gets her first period. At home, a young boy panics unpredictably, his father is furious, his mother is in bed, clipping articles from the newspaper about the latest kidnappings. For Irene, looking back, these are the good times, a past she can retreat to when the future seems ungraspable and unlikely. Wakeful Hours occupies that insomniac space, toggling between the shelter of known violence and the precarity of the present day. A mother now, still living in her childhood home, Irene lives less in her dissolving marriage, her mothering of her infant twins, than in the contested memory of the tumultuous years that remade Colombia, and her family.

Daniella Sánchez Russo (Barranquilla, 1987) is a writer and an academic with a doctorate in Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of her debut novel Wakeful Hours . She was a court reporter for El Espectador , content editor for the magazine Fucsia and currently directs the Language Institute of the University of the North in Barranquilla, Colombia.

Frances Riddle has translated numerous Spanish-language authors, including Isabel Allende, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Claudia Piñeiro, and Leila Guerriero. Her work has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize. Originally from Houston, Texas, she lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.