AlejandroGrenier
Writing about the gap between how history gets made and how it gets remembered.
Buduneli
The hardest part of a revolution isn’t winning. It’s what comes afterwards.
A clerk designs a flag under artillery fire for a nation that does not yet exist. He has no training, no time, and no idea what he's doing. The flag comes out muddy, stitched together from curtain scraps by men who can't write cursive. A bullet punches through the corner. Yet it flies anyway.
Khormuzta is a clerk turned revolutionary who has never led anything larger than a book club. Andrade is a foreign con man who talks his way into becoming a minister of government. Together with a band of idealists who call themselves the Emperor's Men, they overthrow a crumbling tribal council, survive a civil war, and face two empires who view their country as a line on a whiteboard to be erased.
Dozens of voices tell it: the clerk who approves apple pie as the national food without ever having seen one, the farmer who internalizes an identity he never asked for, the boy who fires a rocket launcher and earns a word he still doesn't quite understand, the monk who trades his robes for a rifle and the soldier who trades his rifle for robes.
“A Step-by-step, How-to-do-it Manual for Having a Revolution. First, make a flag.” Gregg Sapp, Reedsy Discovery
For libraries & booksellers
Buduneli is available in paperback through IngramSpark. Review copies, press materials, and local-author inquiries are welcome.
Paperback: $14.99 · Kindle: $4.99
Genre: Literary fiction / political satire
Review: Reedsy Discovery
Review
Reedsy Discovery · Loved it
“A Step-by-step, How-to-do-it Manual for Having a Revolution.”
Gregg Sapp called Buduneli a politico-comic novel about “bureaucratic novices making it up on-the-fly” as they try to assemble a nation out of flags, ministries, letters, patrols, anthems, and arguments over what the country even is.
He wrote that the novel contains “quality satirical jabs” that call to mind the madness in current political circumstances.
Reviewed by Gregg Sapp, author of the Holidazed satires · Read the full review
About the Author
Alejandro Grenier is a student at Virginia Tech and a cadet in Army ROTC. His interests run toward the gap between how history gets made and how it gets remembered, and how the difference often obscures what makes history worth remembering.
He writes about invented states, political memory, and the strange rituals by which people make history feel official. Buduneli is his first novel.
Correspondence
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