AUTHOR

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HUMANS HAVE LONG BEEN FASCINATED BY MARTIANS— and in 1949 Ecuador, that fascination turned tragic. Inspired by Orson Welles’s infamous War of the Worlds broadcast in America nearly 10 years earlier, an Ecuadorian radio station aired its own dramatization. The result: chaos, a panicked riot, lost lives, and a fire that burned Radio Quito to the ground. 

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Growing up in Quito, I often heard stories about that night. But it wasn’t until more recently that I began to imagine the human drama behind the headlines. Why would Radio Quito choose to mimic a stunt that had already caused such negative consequences in the United States? How did a dramatization spiral into tragedy—and who might have wanted it that way? 

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That question became the heart of The Night We Became Strangers. Set eight years after the transmission, the novel follows aspiring photojournalist Valeria as she investigates the broadcast’s long shadow—uncovering why it destroyed two families, a business, and her future with Matías, the boy she once loved. 

 

I invite you to step into a world where truth blurs with fiction, and one night of panic echoes across years of secrets, betrayals, and transgression.

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[Many of the locations in the novel—including the site of the radio station—are real and marked on this map, though names have been changed.]