Paises de Origen - by Javier Fuentes (Paperback)

About the Book

New York, 2007. Demetrio, a twenty-four-year-old, works as a pastry chef at the French restaurant Le Bourrelet. This would be his seventh year as a pâtissier, but the stern but fatherly chef-owner feels the young man should continue to advance his career. When Demetrio is offered a position as head pastry chef at a Michelin star restaurant, he wants to take it, but as an undocumented immigrant, he is missing something crucial: papers. Terrified of being found out, he makes the difficult decision to return permanently to his native country, to which he has not been since he was a child. That will mean leaving behind the only family he knows: his beloved uncle Chus, who raised him and with whom he still lives. On the flight to Madrid, he sits next to handsome, wisecracking, and sensitive Jacobo, a New York University student who comes home to his ultra-conservative, aristocratic family, and chemistry instantly strikes between them. In dimly lit bars in Madrid and on stony beaches far from the city, Demetrio and Jacobo's subtle but intense relationship unfolds little by little. Demetrio is tortured by fear of intimacy and anxiety over his class difference. Both find it difficult to accept their identities and sexualities, and avoid their true feelings until a family tragedy causes their lives to collide again. Powerfully sensual and dramatic, Countries of Origin is a story that plunges into intense emotions and conflicts of love and loss.