Bogotá, 2025. Six of the seven are still alive. They meet in Abelardo’s apartment to mark the publication of a posthumous novel: the book their dead colleague spent forty years writing, sent in a manila envelope three days before he died.
The seven arrived together at the San Telmo in February 1979, young teachers at a school for the sons of Bogotá’s wealthy families, hired by an American Benedictine monk who believed the privileged could still be made to think. They left together in 1985. What was happening in the school behind the doors of their classrooms they did not know then. Some of them know now.
Those Who Left is a novel about the harm that accumulates in the silence between proximity and naming, and about what the dead require of those who keep the letters.
Bogotá, 2025. Seis ex profesores del prestigioso Colegio San Telmo se reúnen por primera vez en cuatro décadas, convocados por la muerte de Aurelio, el séptimo miembro del grupo, que dejó una novela póstuma que ninguno se atreve a leer.
Durante una noche que se extiende hasta el amanecer reviven los “años dorados” de mediados de los ochenta, cuando eran profesores jóvenes e idealistas en un colegio de élite. Pero los recuerdos no son tan luminosos: el Padre Otto y los rumores nunca investigados, las señales que ignoraron, las preguntas que no hicieron.
Los Que Se Fueron es una novela coral sobre las contradicciones de la vocación docente, el privilegio y el peso de lo no dicho.
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