Fruit of the Drunken Tree

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“The night before the girl Petrona arrived, Mamá made three stacks with her tarot cards on her breakfast table and asked, ‘Is the girl Petrona trustworthy?”

Fruit of the Drunken Tree book cover

Seven-year-old Chula lives a carefree life in her gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of car bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations hovers just outside her walls, occasionally appearing on her TV. When her mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city’s guerrilla-occupied neighborhood, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona’s mysterious ways. As both girls’ families scramble to survive amid the escalating drug war, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras headshot

Born and raised in Bogotá, Ingrid Rojas Contreras is also the author of a memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Fruit of the Drunken Tree was a silver medal winner from the California Book Awards and a New York Times editor’s choice.

Because Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a beautifully written, compulsively readable account of two girls growing up in daily fear of unimaginable loss and violence.

“I remember being a young person and being completely alarmed by what was happening, and also feeling like maybe there wasn’t an adult in the room,” says Ingrid Rojas Contreras on the Living Writers podcast. Listen to the whole three-question interview here.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras at Colgate

Join us in person or via Zoom on Thursday, Oct. 31, for a reading and book-signing by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. All Living Writers events take place at 4:30 ET in Persson Auditorium. Refreshments available.

Beyond the Book

  • The New York Times calls Fruit of the Drunken Tree “a beautifully rendered novel of an Escobar-era Colombian childhood.”
  • “Bogotá is a fast-moving place, but the myth of the city is immured in each generation’s view of the past and even the present is up for grabs and who can tell about the future?” writes Ms. Rojas Contreras in this essay for Guernica. 
  • “And this is also what I love most about being an immigrant—that the majority culture can act like a combustible that burns and clarifies who you really are,” says Ms. Rojas Contreras, in this short piece about her approach to teaching creative writing. 
  • In this NPR interview, Ms. Rojas Contreras talks about the real people and events—a kidnapping plot especially—on which Fruit of the Drunken Tree is based.

“She said, I’ll pray, and I understood I had risked everything for another woman’s daughter, and nobody would do the same for me.”

Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree