A Novel in Which Nightmares Are All Too Real
In 1976, the Argentine armed forces staged a coup against the president of Argentina, Isabel Perón. In short order, the military installed a junta that suspended political parties and various government functions, aggressively pursued free-market policies, and disappeared thousands of people over the next seven years. Victims of the regime—suspected dissidents or “subversives”—were abducted, tortured, and murdered, and many were buried in unmarked, mass graves. This period of state terror, the so-called Dirty War, has left a legacy of trauma that bedevils Argentina to this day.
The Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez’s grand, eloquent, and startling new novel, , begins during this crisis and unfolds across subsequent and preceding years., Enriquez’s first novel to be published in English, reveals how sometimes, only fiction can fully illuminate the monstrous, indescribable, and ultimately shattering aspects of our reality.
