In a city shaped by inequality, surveillance, and an order imposed through fear, the young woman Ada tries to escape guided by fragments of a forbidden book. Hunted by a ruthless regime and accompanied by other fugitives, she crosses territories charged with memory and violence in a journey of adventure and resistance that will lead her to discover her own identity and the real possibility of a different future.
Ada lives in the Southwestern Plains (PSO), one of the city’s poorest and most overcrowded zones. Above it rise The Hills, where the elites live and from where everything is controlled. Below lies the Subsoil, a labyrinth of tunnels and channels where the discarded struggle to survive. The structure is simple and brutal: privilege at the top, exploitation in the middle, misery at the bottom.
One night, men from The Hills break into Ada’s home and take her away. There, she discovers that her mother agreed to hand her over as a surrogate in exchange for keeping their housing and her job. After the forced pregnancy, Ada is returned to the PSO with a scar that marks both her body and her place within the system.
As she tries to rebuild her life in an environment shaped by scarcity, surveillance, and her mother’s guilt, the city is hit by massive floods that shut down services and submerge entire blocks in contaminated water. Amid the chaos, Ada finds fragments of a forbidden book her mother had secretly kept—verses that hint at the existence of a real way out of the closed world they inhabit.
When the emergency subsides, Ada returns to the building where her mother had been staying and discovers she has disappeared without explanation. This sudden absence drives Ada to follow the clues hidden in the book. She does so with two allies: Eme, who knows other fragments of the text, and Ese, who inherited from his father information about the tunnels of the Subsoil. The three of them embark on a clandestine escape through the sewer and drainage system, guided by verses that seem to describe a path leading outside.
The journey is dangerous. The Subsoil is filled with misery, violence, and superstition. The flow of sewage is unpredictable: floodgates open without warning, sudden currents push the group to the brink of death. They also discover that the State uses these tunnels to make bodies disappear and maintain control through fear.
At the climax, a surge of water sweeps Ada away, separating her from the others. On the verge of death, she is driven by the current into an ancient conduit that leads beyond the city. When she finally emerges, she finds herself in a green, clean territory—an environment completely different from the plains. There, a community recognizes her as someone who has crossed the threshold described in the verses: a woman capable of leaving behind the name and the history imposed on her by the system.
The novel closes with Ada understanding that her mother did not betray her merely to survive; she also pushed her, silently, toward the only real door of escape. And now Ada knows that if she managed to cross, others might be able to do so as well.
The Memory of Stones is the odyssey of a young woman who travels through a world of control, misery, and exploited bodies to discover something radical: that an outside exists. Her journey is a chase, an escape, and a rebirth—a story in which the violence of the system is confronted by the intimate resistance of someone who refuses to accept the destiny assigned to her.
RELEVANT INFORMATION: Catalina Holguín is a Colombian writer, editor, academic, and researcher with a significant career in literature, publishing, and the humanities. In addition to her work as a writer, she has played an active role in promoting reading across the Ibero-American world and regularly collaborates as a cultural journalist, translator, and essayist.
The Memory of Stones is her debut novel, a story rich in symbolism and social critique that combines the rawness of dystopia with elements of adventure and a strong, hopeful dramatic arc: an emotional coming-of-age journey that transforms the protagonist from a survivor into the owner of her own destiny. The ending leaves the door open to a possible continuation.
What the press says:
“In The Memory of Stones, Catalina Holguín takes the chaos of our lives and puts it in order, so that we can see the horror. And from there, she invites us to let go of the rope and jump, holding on to the memory of a verse.” —Margarita Valencia
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Feature Film, TV Movie
AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish
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