Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves--lines from...

Yolanda Garcia finds success with her first novel in which she made characters out of her family members and friends, but her "fictionally victimized" relatives exact revenge by telling all they know about the author, Yo.

Latina novelist Alma Huebner begs off joining her husband on a humanitarian mission to the Dominican Republic to work on her next book, and finds herself becoming obsessed with the life of her subject--a woman who hand-picked a group of orphan boys to serve as live carriers of the small pox virus in order to provide Spaniard Francisco Xavier Balmis a ready supply of vaccine with which to inoculate the populations of Spain's American colonies in 1803....