Day of All Saints

Fiction. Latino/Latina Studies. Martín Silva de Choc, childhood survivor of an army massacre during the Guatemalan civil war, and now a language-school teacher in Guatemala City, falls in love with his American student, Abby, and follows her home to Chicago on a fiancé visa. Days before their wedding, however, Abby goes missing, and on a Halloween afternoon Martín embarks on a search that leads from the ghost- strewn yards of Chicago's North Side to the Lincoln Park Conservatory—and ultimately back to his violent past. A story about repressed secrets and the limits of love, DAY OF ALL SAINTS traces the effects of historical trauma on individual lives.

Patricia Grace King grew up in North Carolina and has since lived in Atlanta, Chicago, and Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, as well as in Spain, Guatemala, and the UK. She is the author of two chapbooks, Rubia (The Florida Review) and The Death of Carrie Bradshaw (Kore Press); her short stories have been published by Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, and Nimrod. She was the 2013-2014 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and now lives in Durham, England, where she is finishing a novel as well as a story collection, and writes the biweekly blog, Wuthering Yankee.