What Is Otherwise Infinite
Citizens by Treaty

In the Time of the Butterflies

Set in the Dominican Republic during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship of the 1960s, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters–four women who opposed Trujillo, and became immortalized as Las Mariposas, “The Butterflies”.

It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas–“The Butterflies.”

In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters–Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé–speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • When he was a homesteader in Alaska, poet John Haines moved away from language and institutions to an older and simpler existence.

  • Journey to the dusty little town of Lonesome Dove, where retired Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call undertake a perilous cattle drive to the untamed plains of Montana.

  • Discover this transcendent middle grade masterpiece about a young black boy whose quiet rural live in the Appalachian Mountains begins to change—winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. Mayo Cornelius Higgins sits on his gleaming, forty-foot steel pole, towering over his home on Sarah’s Mountain. Stretched before him are rolling hills and shady valleys. But behind him lie the wounds of strip mining, including a mountain of rubble that may one day fall and bury his home. M.C. dreams of escape for himself and his family. And, one day, atop his pole, he [...]