Book picks similar to
Mi hermano el alcalde by Fernando Vallejo


colombia
latinoamérica
ameryka-południowa
adquirido

Demasiado Amor


Sara Sefchovich - 1998
    This is the story of two sisters and their close relationship despite the distance between them. One of them encounters a great love in her life that leads her to experience many things.

A Luminous Republic


Andrés Barba - 2017
    But then the children arrived.No one knew where they came from: thirty-two kids, seemingly born of the jungle, speaking an unknown language. At first they scavenged, stealing food and money and absconding to the trees. But their transgressions escalated to violence, and then the city’s own children began defecting to join them. Facing complete collapse, municipal forces embark on a hunt to find the kids before the city falls into irreparable chaos.Narrated by the social worker who led the hunt, A Luminous Republic is a suspenseful, anguished fable that “could be read as Lord of the Flies seen from the other side, but that would rob Barba of the profound originality of his world” (Juan Gabriel Vásquez).

Senselessness


Horacio Castellanos Moya - 2004
    The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger—after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.

The Remainder


Alia Trabucco Zerán - 2015
    The city is covered in ash. Three children of ex-militants are facing a past they can neither remember nor forget. Felipe sees dead bodies on every corner of the city, counting them up in an obsessive quest to square these figures with the official death toll. He is searching for the perfect zero, a life with no remainder. Iquela and Paloma, too, are searching for a way to live on. When the body of Paloma’s mother gets lost in transit, the three take a hearse and a bottle of pisco up the cordillera for a road trip with a difference. Intense, intelligent, and extraordinarily sensitive to the shape and weight of words, this remarkable debut presents a new way to count the cost of a pain that stretches across generations.

In Her Absence


Antonio Muñoz Molina - 1999
    But when he walks through the door of his apartment, he is transformed into the impassioned lover of Blanca, the beautiful, inscrutable wife he saved from the brink of personal crisis. For the love of Blanca, Mario eats sushi and carpaccio, nods in feigned understanding at experimental films, sits patiently through long conversations with her avant-garde friends, and conceals his disgust at shocking art exhibits.Then, little by little, a strange and ominous threat begins to weigh on the marriage.How can love survive its own disappearance? The desperate answer that Antonio Mu�oz Molina proposes in this short, circular novella is a model of literary strategy and style, a splendid homage to Flaubert.

By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept


Paulo Coelho - 1994
    She has learned well how to bury her feelings... and he has turned to religion as a refuge from his raging inner conflicts.Now they are together once again, embarking on a journey fraught with difficulties, as long-buried demons of blame and resentment resurface after more than a decade. But in a small village in the French Pyrenees, by the waters of the River Piedra, a most special relationship will be reexamined in the dazzling light of some of life’s biggest questions.

The Book of Murder


Guillermo Martínez - 2007
    Now, with this new tale of psychological suspense, Martínez is poised to expand on the success of The Oxford Murders.The narrator is an up-and-coming young writer who has little in common with Kloster—a literary giant whose disturbing crime novels dominate the bestseller lists. However, they have both, at one time, employed the secretarial services of the alluring Luciana B. Out of the past, Luciana makes a desperate plea to the young writer. She thinks that Kloster is slowly killing off everyone close to her—can he help before her grandmother and younger sister are murdered?While the narrator suspects her misfortunes have driven her mad, Kloster has a powerful motive; and eerie parallels surface between the murders in Kloster’s books and the real-life deaths surrounding Luciana. As the body count multiplies, the question arises: Can words really kill? Fans of both Alfred Hitchcock and Carlos Ruiz Zafón will be thrilled with Martínez’s literary murder mystery.

Sánchez


Esther García Llovet - 2019
    She asks him to help her deliver a greyhound named Cromwell to an Italian who is dedicated to the racing business.

La loca de la casa


Rosa Montero - 2003
    She undertakes a trip to her inner self in a narrative game full of surprises. It is a magician's hat from which she reveals amazing and unexpected events. In this book, she mixes literature and life in an aphrodisiacal cocktail of other people's biographies and a semi-fictional autobiography. This is, above all, a torrid story of love and salvation between her and her imagination.

Eartheater


Dolores Reyes - 2019
    With her first taste of dirt, she learns the horrifying truth of her mother’s death. Disturbed by what she witnesses, the woman keeps her visions to herself. But when Earth-eater begins an unlikely relationship with a withdrawn police officer, word of her ability begins to spread, and soon desperate members of her community beg for her help, anxious to uncover the truth about their own loved ones.Surreal and haunting, spare yet complex, Earth-eater is a dark, emotionally resonant tale told from a feminist perspective that brilliantly explores the stories of those left behind—the women enduring the pain of uncertainty, whose lives have been shaped by violence and loss.

Nada


Carmen Laforet - 1944
    Loosely based on the author’s own life, it is the story of an orphaned young woman who leaves her small town to attend university in war-ravaged Barcelona.Residing amid genteel poverty in a mysterious house on Calle de Aribau, young Andrea falls in with a wealthy band of schoolmates who provide a rich counterpoint to the squalor of her home life. As experience overtakes innocence, Andrea gradually learns the disquieting truth about the people she shares her life with: her overbearing and superstitious aunt Angustias; her nihilistic yet artistically gifted uncle Román and his violent brother Juan; and Juan’s disturbingly beautiful wife, Gloria, who secretly supports the clan with her gambling. From existential crisis to a growing maturity and resolve, Andrea’s passionate inner journey leaves her wiser, stronger, and filled with hope for the future.The incomparable Edith Grossman’s vital new translation captures the feverish energy of Laforet’s magnificent story, showcasing its dark, powerful imagery, and its subtle humor. And Mario Vargas Llosa’s Introduction illuminates Laforet’s brilliant depiction of life during the early days of the Franco regime. With crystalline insight into the human condition, Carmen Laforet’s classic novel stands poised to reclaim its place as one of the great novels of twentieth-century Europe.

My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain


Patricio Pron - 2011
    In his parents' house, he finds a cache of documents-articles, maps, photographs-and unwittingly begins to unearth his father's obsession with the disappearance of a local man. Suddenly he comes face-to-face with the ghosts of Argentina's dark political past and with the long-hidden memories of his family's underground resistance against an oppressive military regime. As the fragments of the narrator's investigation fall into place-revealing not only a part of his father's life he had tried to forget but also the legacy of an entire generation- My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain tells a completely original story of family and remembrance. It is an audacious accomplishment by an internationally acclaimed voice poised to garner equal acclaim in America.

Kamchatka


Marcelo Figueras - 2003
    In that fantastic and inaccessible territory is where the ten year-old boy will take mental refuge to cure his wounds. Due to the abductions during Argentina's coup d tat, and knowing they are being chased, his parents decide to hide away. Through the story of this boy forced to contemplate the dark side of reality, Figueras tells a story full of sweet and humorous characters, which is also an adventure.

Faces in the Crowd


Valeria Luiselli - 2011
    In Harlem, a translator is desperate to publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet. And in Philadelphia, Gilberto Owen recalls his friendship with Lorca, and the young woman he saw in the windows of passing trains. Valeria Luiselli's debut signals the arrival of a major international writer and an unexpected and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

Solitaire of Love


Cristina Peri Rossi - 1988
    Only the fourth book of Peri Rossi’s to be translated into English—the others are The Ship of Fools, A Forbidden Passion, and Dostoevsky’s Last Night—Solitaire of Love showcases the mesmerizingly rhythmic language that has become the trademark of this award-winning and prolific author of novels, essay collections, poetry, and short stories. Tracing the course of a relationship as it evolves into uncompromising self-destruction, the narrator of Solitaire of Love becomes addicted to his own passion and to the body of his beloved. Erotic, romantic love becomes bewitchment, producing a heightened state where time is measured in the rhythms of a chosen body and pride becomes subservient to obsession. The specifics of this other body trump any claim to ordinary existence for the narrator, as sex becomes a kind of idolatrous slavery and love becomes a mechanism for self-immolation. As in Peri Rossi’s other works, an ambiguous sense of gender and sexuality arise from her uniquely experimental prose and mystically erotic logic. Language is subsumed into this process as a way to bear witness, to transfix and capture the love object. The limbo of obsession, as described by Peri Rossi, creates an infantilizing brand of loneliness, broken by flashes of joy, insight, fury, and fear. This novel was originally published in Spanish in 1988.