The Weight of All Things A Novel

Sandra Benitez received international acclaim for her first two novels: A Place Where the Sea Remembers and Bitter Grounds. Now she returns with an unforgettable tale of life in war-torn El Salvador. The Weight of All Things, like Kosinskis The Painted Bird, illuminates and makes particular the horrors that people at war can inflict on a young boy. More than any report of events in El Salvador, the story of Nicolas Veras and his terrible odyssey in a war torn country will stay with you.

Sandra Benítez is the author of A Place Where the Sea Remembers, which won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. She is also the author of Bitter Grounds, which won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award, and The Weight of All Things, which was a Book Sense 76 selection. Benítez is a past Keller-Edelstein Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Minnesota, and recently won a Bush Foundation Fellowship in Fiction. She lives in Minnesota.