When Octavio Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, it was in recognition of the fact that for many years he had been the pre-eminent poet in the Spanish speaking world. His work takes the traditions of Mexican poetry as well as French and Spanish influences, and adds what he himself read of his contemporaries in Mexico, Britain and France, in particular, the Surrealists. But Paz was also a great polemicist and essayist, described by V. S. Naipaul as ‘a kind of Mexican George Orwe...

Mexico City has always been a seat of empire. In its grandiose pretentions and sheer swagger, it gives the impression of power exercised over great distances. And yet this power has frequently been contested, lending the city a tough, battle-hardened look. At the same time, life in the Mexican capital can be carefree and intoxicating, and it continues to offer any visitor not only glimpses of past grandeur, but a fascinating wealth of the culture of Mexico today. This book explores how the...

Nick Caistor has lived for several years in Buenos Aires as well as visiting it often over the past three decades. He has reported on Argentina for the BBC and is a translator as well as the author of several books on Latin America. The architect Le Corbusier once called Buenos Aires the capital of an imaginary empire . From its foundation in the sixteenth century, Argentina's main city has been a place of the imagination as well as the scene of many striking historical events. From foreig...

Olivier Norek: Former police officer, writer on SPIRAL and a million-copy bestseller"The greatest exponent of the policier at work today" Mark Sanderson, The Times"Exhilarating . . . This is not conventional crime" Barry Forshaw, FTWhen a routine kidnapping case goes badly wrong, Capitaine Vincent Coste breaks his golden rule: he starts to take things personally.And with his career ...

**OVER TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD!THE RUNAWAY BESTSELLERFall in love with the inspiring, emotional and feel-good story of one woman’s life-changing journey to happiness. Perfect for fans of Fredrik Backman, Matt Haig and Before the Coffee Gets Cold.**'My therapist told me to buy this book, and she was right. Fantastic.' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐'A beautiful wake-up call for me.' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐It's never too late to be h...

"Both a scathing and picaresque comedy, a biting and spicy concoction. Just like tequila."—Le MondeIt's not easy being a cop in Mexico City. Meet Carlito, a police detective with a complicated life. A wife, a mistress, children by both. He resorts to money laundering and arms dealing to finance his police activity. The money for justice must be found somewhere.The corpse in the hotel room is that of a gringo with a weakness for blue movies. Carlito's maverick investigation ...

Sergio Ramírez, writer and former civilian leader in the Sandinista revolutionary government from 1985-1990, has now won the Cervantes Prize, the highest literary award in the Hispanic world. He wrote his great panoramic novel from exile, and this was the first Nicaraguan novel ever translated into English. The long years of dictatorship in Nicaragua are dramatically recreated as cabaret singers, activists, policemen, prostitutes, beauty queens and would-be presidents haunt this sophistica...

If I close my eyes now, I can still feel her blood on my fingers. If only I had closed my eyes then, or kept my mouth shut, not told anyone about our discovery by the swimming hole, we could have gone back to dreaming about spaceships.A horrifying discovery by two young boys while playing in a mango plantation marks the end of their childhood. As they finally open their eyes to the adult world, they see a place where storybook heroes don't exist but villains and lies do ...

Santiago is trapped. Taken political prisoner in Montevideo after a brutal military coup, he can do nothing but write letters to his family, and try to stay sane.Far away, his nine-year-old daughter Beatrice wonders at the marvels of 1970s Buenos Aires, but her grandpa and mother - Santiago's beautiful, careworn wife, Graciela - struggle to adjust to a life in exile. Graciela fights to retain the fiery passion that suffused her marriage, her politics, her whole life, as day by day ...

Lola Jost is busy fending off boredom with a jigsaw puzzle when she hears the news. Arnaud Mars - a disgraced police divisionnaire on the run after a seismic defence contracts scandal - has been found dead in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast. The gun that killed him belongs to Commandant Sacha Duguin, a former colleague of Lola's.Convinced of Duguin's innocence, Lola throws off her torpor. Together with her occasional partner in crime fighting Ingrid Diesel, she embarks on a quest to cle...

In the late '60s, Julián Ríos began work on what would have been his very first novel, but fearing that it wouldn't pass the stringent Spanish censorship under Franco, decided not to submit the completed book to publishers. Soon distracted by what would be his magnum opus—the Larva series—the manuscript was set aside and forgotten, until the author found and dusted it off almost fifty years later. Quite unlike his later postmodernist work, the short and bitter Procession of Sh...

New York, 1923, the Argentine Luis Angel Firpo, called the Wild Bull of the Pampas, knocks out of the ring the American Jack Dempsey, heavyweight champion of the world. In Buenos Aires, the match is transmitted on the radio and Firpo proclaimed world champion. However, the referee does not count the time outside the ring. Dempsey comes back and knocks the challenger out. The Wild Bull of the Pampas will have been world champion for only 17 seconds. Trelew, Patagonia, 1973: to celebrate the...