Savage Coast (45 page)

DEPARTING AT DAWN: A NOVEL OF ARGENTINA'S DIRTY WAR

Gloria Lisé

eISBN: 9781558616479 | ISBN: 9781558616035

March 23, 1976. Berta watches as her lover, Atilio, a union organizer, is thrown from a window to his death on the sidewalk below. The next day, Colonel Jorge Rafael Videla stages a coup d'état and a military dictatorship takes control of Argentina. Though never a part of Atilio's union efforts, Berta is on a list to be “disappeared” and flees to relatives in the countryside. There she becomes part of the family she knows only from old photographs: Aunt Avelina, who blasts records from an old player; Uncle Nepomuceno, who watches slugs slither in the garden every afternoon; and Uncle Javier, who sits in his tiny grocery store day and night. When Berta learns that government officials are still looking for her, she realizes she must run even further to save her life.

Gloria Lisé describes a terrifying period in her nation's history with a touch that is light yet penetrating. A powerful portrait of Argentinians caught up in traumas that have haunted the country ever since.

“It never ceases to astound me how many people around the world choose to deny a dark period in the history of their respective nations. Anyone anywhere today in need of the reminder that political change begins with speaking out should read this testimony.”

—Ana Castillo, poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist

“I just loved it because of its immense human depth and high quality of writing.”

—David William Foster, author of
Violence in Argentine Literature: Cultural Responses to Tyranny

“From the heart of Argentina comes a novel of the heart, where the outbreak of our worst military dictatorship is told with utmost reserve.
Departing at Dawn
is a beautifully simple, poetic story of solidarity and love, with memorable characters painted in the tender strokes of a watercolor.”

—Luisa Valenzuela, author of
Black Novel with Argentines
and
Symmetries

GLORIA LISÉ
is a lawyer and professor at the National University of Salta in Argentina.

THE SILENT DUCHESS

Dacia Maraini

Afterword by Anna Camaiti-Hostert

eISBN: 9781558617834 | ISBN: 9781558612228

FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE.
Set in Sicily in the early eighteenth-century, the novel tells the story of Marianna, the daughter of an aristocratic family and the victim of a mysterious childhood trauma that has left her deaf and mute, trapped in a world of silence. In luminous language that conveys both the keen visual sight and the deep human insight possessed by her remarkable main character, Dacia Maraini captures the splendor and the corruption of Marianna's world and the strength of her unbreakable spirit.

“Maraini brilliantly conveys the mixture of luxury and squalor in which the Sicilian aristocracy lived. . . .
The Silent Duchess
manages totally to overpower the reader with its narrative urgency. . . . Since she won the Prix Formentor in 1963, Dacia Maraini has produced nothing finer than this.”

—Evening Standard
, London

“One of those rare, rich, deep, strange novels that create a world so fantastic and so real you want to start reading it again as soon as you come to the last page.”

—Katha Politt

“The Silent Duchess
has a subtlety of perception, a delicacy in probing emotions and above all, an elusive feel for history itself. . . . The narrative has the richness of a saga. . . . This history of a woman's quest for dignity is an astonishing achievement.”

—The Independent
, London

DACIA MARAINI
is the author of more than fifty books, including novels, plays, collections of poetry, and critical essays.