Season of the Hummingbirds

About this book

La Niebla is the last high finca on its ridge still growing coffee the old way, under the forest canopy instead of in cleared sun, and shade grown coffee at that altitude is a labour of love that stopped paying a decade ago. When her grandmother dies, Lucía, thirty three, an agronomist working for an export company down in the valley, inherits a beautiful failing farm and a stack of honest debts, and does the sensible thing: she lists it, and the only serious buyer wants to clear the canopy and plant the modern sun tolerant variety in full light, which pays, and which would end, in one felling season, the forest her family kept for a hundred years.