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...

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...

The Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro is one of the most written-about men in the world today. Most approaches to his life are either glowing hagiographies, or critical rants in which he is portrayed as a dictator who has kept the island of Cuba under his heel. By contrast, Nick Caistor brings together personal details and a discussion of the ideas driving Castro throughout his life; his ultimate aim is to give readers the opportunity to judge for themselves whether or not, as Castro himsel...

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...

The Montreal Olympics, 1976. A fourteen-year-old girl steps out onto the floor of the Montreal Forum and into history.Twenty seconds on the uneven bars is it all it takes for Nadia Comaneci, the slight, unsmiling child from Communist Romania, to etch herself into the collective memory. The judges award her an unprecedented perfect ten, the first in Olympic gymnastics.In The Little Communist Who Never Smiled, Lola Lafon weaves an intricate web of truth and fiction a...

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 ...

When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, they were not expecting the Finns to fight back – much less to prevail. Olivier Norek's riveting, heart-pounding, epic historical thriller is a story of barely imaginable courage, astonishing resilience, and the best sniper the world has ever seen.`Timely, thrilling and deeply affecting … the appeal of this tour de force owes a lot to its intensity, brilliance, and ferocity, but also to a deeply moving portrai...

Snared between two cultures and two loves, one man is forced to choose...1564, the Kingdom of Granada. After years of Christian oppression, the Moors take arms and daub the white houses of Sierra Nevada with the blood of their victims.Amidst the conflict is young Hernando , the son of an Arab woman and the Christian priest who raped her. He is despised and regularly beaten by his own step-father for his 'tainted' heritage.Fuelled with the love of the ...

Barcelona, Spring 2022. The morning new recruit Vicente Misfit reports for his first day at "The Organisation", a meeting is called to discuss three mysteries:A man has been found hanged in a room in a hotel on the Rambla San José.An Englishman by the name of Jenkins has disappeared from his luxury yacht in the port.The canning company Conservas Fernández is the only firm in these times of high inflation not to have increased its prices at...

Julián Ríos's The House of Ulysses is at once a serious literary excavation and a lecture on the great, often imposing, cornerstone of world literature: James Joyce's Ulysses**.**Some say every book is born out of an earlier book. Just as James Joyce's novel unraveled Homer scene by scene, Julián Ríos's The House of Ulysses returns the favor, giving us the story of several bickering chara...

"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...