Department of Spanish & Portuguese

Professor Adam Lifshey's novel As Green as Paradise favorably compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude

In a recent review in the journal Hispania, Professor Adam Lifshey’s novel As Green as Paradise was favorably compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. The reviewer concludes that “this novel has not received the attention from critics that it deserves. An opulent and highly visual novel…and, I would add, dramatic and cinematographic, should not pass unnoticed.”

As Green as Paradise is available as an e-book and as a paperback on such sites as Amazon, where the novel is described as follows:

“The avocado carver was once a conquistador. This time, though, he aims to arrive in peace, as a governor, leading his relatives across the sea to a new world where they will found a settlement in a green valley. Yet his hopes for harmony with the indigenous people do not develop as planned. And distant dark forces conspire against him, certain that his relatives share a secret and forbidden heritage. His memories pursue him too, images of a childhood upon a faraway island, and of a dusty peninsula that he will never see again.

“As Green as Paradise is a lyrical weave of the governor's story, flowing with fables of beauty and solitude. It is a tale of loves lost and dreams unfulfilled, of characters condemned to forge ahead in a world at once old and new: scribes and inquisitioners, soldiers and scholars, storytellers and warriors, a unicorn hunter and a pirate and a wanderer, a poet and a musician too. And amid story upon story, the governor carves dim codes into the pits of discarded avocados and remembers it all.”

The first half of the Hispania review is available (in Spanish) here.