What Is Otherwise Infinite
Citizens by Treaty

In the Time of the Butterflies

Set in the Dominican Republic during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship of the 1960s, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters–four women who opposed Trujillo, and became immortalized as Las Mariposas, “The Butterflies”.

It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas–“The Butterflies.”

In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters–Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé–speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, Jack and Mabel build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone -- but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

  • Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 1906) overcame racism and poverty to become one of the best-known authors in America, and the first African American to earn a living from his poetry, fiction, drama, journalism, and lectures.

  • The Tradition explores cultural threats on black bodies, resistance, and the interplay of desire and privilege in a dangerous era.