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The Call

Name: The Call
Price: 38.00 USD
Availability: PreOrder
Author: Leila Guerriero
ISBN: 9798217207947

Hardcover $38.00

Available on Feb 23, 2027 | 448 Pages

Preorder from:

$38.00

Available on Feb 23, 2027 | 448 Pages

Preorder from:

A clear-eyed, haunting story of an ordinary woman struggling to survive captivity, and its aftermath, in the volatile world of 1970s Argentina

“Infused with the intensity of a thriller and with such poetic force, The Call is a masterclass. A hundred years from now, we’ll still be talking about this tour de force.” —Samanta Schweblin, National Book Award-winning author of Good & Evil and Other Stories

In December 1976, twenty-year-old Silvia Labayru, five months pregnant, was kidnapped by paramilitary soldiers and taken to a clandestine Buenos Aires detention center called ESMA where thousands of people were tortured and murdered. For years, Labayru was forced to perform slave labor, repeatedly raped, and coerced into playing a part in a military operation that resulted, to international outrage, in the high-profile disappearance of three Argentine activists and two French nuns. When Labayru was finally freed in 1979, she fled to Madrid, where she thought the agony was over—but the Argentine expat community condemned her, accusing her of collusion with her captors. Nonetheless, she built a life for herself in Spain, until, decades later, she received a phone call from an ex-lover, with whom she returns to Argentina, her beloved homeland and the site of her indescribable trauma.

Over the course of two years, Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero sat down to interview Labayru and her family, friends, children, lovers, and ex-militants. With The Call, she has woven their voices together into a polyphonic picture of a woman, a family, an ex-pat community, and a nation wading through memories distorted by trauma and edited by fear, shame, denial, and hubris. Portraitist and investigator, archaeologist and witness—Guerriero has earned comparisons to Svetlana Alexievich for her ability to excavate facts even as she wrings from them a propulsive tale of redemption, memory, and betrayal.

“This book is crucial to an understanding of the devastation wrought by authoritarianism, not only in society at large but also in terms of the personal, of the body, of inheritance. A woman who was used as a spoil of war, who was exploited and later maligned—this enigmatic woman, Silvia, bares herself to Leila Guerriero’s insatiable curiosity and intelligence. It’s an unforgettable encounter, and a contemporary classic.” —Mariana Enriquez, author of Our Share of Night

“Stunning, overwhelming, and utterly, brilliantly, painfully affecting.” —Philippe Sands, author of East West Street and 38 Londres Street

“What moves me about this book is what unspools as the pages turn: the portrayal of a female journalist in pursuit of the lives of others, comparing their memories and their blind spots and their versions of the past, asking questions again and again to get close to a humble truth about who we are as human beings, all with the awareness of the profound difficulty of understanding others.” —Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Shape of the Ruins

“Infused with the intensity of a thriller and with such poetic force, The Call is a masterclass in writing an impossible book. A hundred years from now, we’ll still be talking about this tour de force of Leila Guerriero’s.” —Samanta Schweblin, National Book Award-winning author of Good & Evil and Other Stories

“Leila Guerriero’s journalism is that of the New Yorker’s best writers: It requires rigorous work, exhaustive investigations, and a style of mathematical precision.” —Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“Leila Guerriero is one of the most significant voices in Latin American journalism, a writer of uncommon depth and bravery. Her newest work, The Call, is an instant classic: a riveting tale of Argentina’s most complicated and traumatic years, and a portrait of the idealists whose youth was marked by radicalism and political violence. The Call reads like a novel, a page-turner, a mystery, and a vindication all at once.” —Daniel Alarcón, author of The King is Always Above the People

Author

Leila Guerriero

LEILA GUERRIERO is an Argentine journalist and writer. She began her career at the magazine Página/30, and since then her work has appeared in various publications in Latin America and Europe: Argentina’s La nación and Rolling Stone; Spain’s El país; Brazil’s Piauí; Colombia’s El malpensante and SoHo; the U.K.’s Granta; and others. She is also the Latin America editor for the Mexican magazine Gatopardo and the author of nine other books.MEGAN McDOWELL has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today. Her translations have won the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the English PEN award, the Premio Valle-Inclán, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been nominated for the International Booker Prize (four times) and the Kirkus Prize. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is from Richmond, Kentucky, and lives in Santiago, Chile.

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By Leila GuerrieroTranslated by Megan McDowell

By Leila GuerrieroTranslated by Megan McDowell

By Leila GuerrieroTranslated by Megan McDowell

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