The Country Under My Skin

A Memoir of Love and War

by Gioconda Belli; Kristina Cordero

Gioconda Belli grew up in Managua, had a privileged childhood, married young, became a poet, and was in Nicaragua during the revolution as a Sandinista, after which she lived abroad in exile until the establishment of the Sandinista government, in which she held a prominent post. Looking back on her life. Belli sums up the effects on her personal life and character of her long career as a revolutionary.

Editions of The Country Under My Skin

	ISBN 9781400032167	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Anchor Books	Date 2003	Price $9.56	NEW
	ISBN 9780375403705	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Random House Inc	Date 2002	Price $8.00	Fine

Publisher Notes

An electrifying memoir from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer (“A wonderfully free and original talent”—Harold Pinter) and central figure in the Sandinista Revolution.

Until her early twenties, Gioconda Belli inhabited an upper-class cocoon: sheltered from the poverty in Managua in a world of country clubs and debutante balls; educated abroad; early marriage and motherhood. But in 1970, everything changed. Her growing dissatisfaction with domestic life, and a blossoming awareness of the social inequities in Nicaragua, led her to join the Sandinistas, then a burgeoning but still hidden organization. She would be involved with them over the next twenty years at the highest, and often most dangerous, levels.

Her memoir is both a revelatory insider’s account of the Revolution and a vivid, intensely felt story about coming of age under extraordinary circumstances. Belli writes with both striking lyricism and candor about her personal and political lives: about her family, her children, the men in her life; about her poetry; about the dichotomies between her birth-right and the life she chose for herself; about the failures and triumphs of the Revolution; about her current life, divided between California (with her American husband and their children) and Nicaragua; and about her sustained and sustaining passion for her country and its people.