1990s Baranquilla, where the streets flood whenever it rains. There are fires, the river stinks, and people disappear without a trace. At school, a gang of teenage girls, Los Perros, inaugurates new members with increasingly extreme pranks each time one gets her first period. At home, a young boy panics unpredictably, his father is furious, his mother is in bed, clipping articles from the newspaper about the latest kidnappings. For Irene, looking back, these are the good times, a past she can retreat to when the future seems ungraspable and unlikely. The Waking Hours occupies that insomniac space, toggling between the shelter of known violence and the precarity of the present day. A mother now, still living in her childhood home, Irene lives less in her dissolving marriage, her mothering of her infant twins, than in the contested memory of the tumultuous years that remade Colombia, and her family.