Named a “Best Book of the Year” by Time, People, npr, vanity fair, boston globe
“A lyrical personal account that reclaims a family legacy of indigenous practices, beliefs, and narratives to challenge Western notions of history and memory.”
“In fierce and vivid prose, Ingrid Rojas Contreras explores the legacy of divination and traditional healing that both unites and divides her Colombian family. The result is a spellbinding mixture of memoir and history, filled with insights into culture and colonialism that raise fundamental questions about what is magical, what is real, and who gets to decide. The Man Who Moved Clouds is gorgeous, gripping, and wise; a book to be savored.”
“Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family’s past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism… In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”
“Striking...Beautifully written and layered, an empowering act of recovery and self-discovery.”
“A blazing memoir...A lyrically rich excavation of memory, mythology and history.”
“A memoir full of magic...Using philosophical and startlingly delicate prose, Rojas Contreras spins colonial history, personal narrative and the magical around the axis of her family story. The reader feels their soft rotation, like planets around a sun.”
“The Man Who Could Move Clouds is the work of a genius, a wildly moving, profound, groundbreaking, often hilarious book that I’ll reread until I die. . . Without knowing it, I’ve wanted this book my whole life.”
For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amidst the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house where "what did you dream?" was the preferred greeting in place of "how are you?," very little was out of the ordinary. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called "the secrets: " the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. As a young girl Rojas Contreras spent her days eavesdropping on her mother's fortune-telling clients and eagerly waiting for the phone calls from relatives reporting that her mother's apparition had, yet again, visited them thousands of miles away from where Mami stood in the family's kitchen.
So when Rojas Contreras, now living in the United States, suffered a head injury in her twenties that left her with amnesia--an accident eerily similar to a fall her mother took as a child, from which she woke not just with amnesia, but also the ability to see ghosts--the family assumed "the secrets" had been passed down once again.
Spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey home to Colombia to disinter Nono's remains. With her mother as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often hilarious guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her family into two camps: those who believe "the secrets" are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse.
Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.