Winner: Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction Winner: Independent Publisher Book Award for Multicultural Fiction Winner: New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Fiction Winner: Prix SGDL Révélation de Traduction (French edition) Finalist: Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist: Foreword INDIES Book Award Nominated for an American Book Award "O" The Oprah Magazine: Top 10 Books to Pick Up Now No. 1 pick: 5 Small Press Books to Read, BookRiot, 2016 Uses magical realism, revolutionary politics, and romantic adventure to bring to life a colorful community of squatters in an imaginary Latin American city Damnificados is loosely based on the real-life occupation of a half-completed skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, the Tower of David. In this fictional version, 600 “damnificados”—vagabonds and misfits—take over an abandoned urban tower and set up a community complete with schools, stores, beauty salons, bakeries, and a rag-tag defensive militia. Their always heroic (and often hilarious) struggle for survival and dignity pits them against corrupt police, the brutal military, and the tyrannical “owners.” Taking place in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, the novel has elements of magical realism: avenging wolves, biblical floods, massacres involving multilingual ghosts, arrow showers falling to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth, and a trash truck acting as a Trojan horse.