Once they put you in the trash, everyone's rotten, and nobody gives a damn about who you used to be anymore, or what you used to do. That's just the way it is.
Lina has come home to the country of her childhood. She's not been back for twenty years. Sent away from Colombia to England after her mother's death when she was eight, she's searching for the person who can tell her about their shared past.
She's never forgotten him. Matty - her childhood friend, her best friend, her brother, her protector - now runs the Anthill, a day care refuge for the street kids of Medellin. Lina begins volunteering there, but her reunion with Matty is riven with tension. Memory is fallible, and their versions of what happened are very different.
While Lina confronts her understanding of the country's political and social ruptures, strange events at the Anthill start taking place: scratches on the sup- ply closet door, disturbing crayon drawings, and sightings of a small, dirty boy with pointy teeth. Is this a vision of the boy she once knew, or something more frightening? Did she ever really understand what happened to her own mother, or what happened to Matty's?
The Anthill is the dark and intoxicating debut novel by the author of The Lucky Ones. It's asks what we choose to do with our identity - both inherited and created - and it is a blazing, unforgettable excavation of the very nature of imagination.
