Separated from his wife on the train to Bourges—where she is set to testify against the police agent who abused her during the Pinochet dictatorship 40 years ago—Rafael agonizes over a damning secret that he may be forced to reveal. Will dredging up the past heal their wounds or open new ones?
Leo, a terminally ill man, has decided to end his life, but not before fulfilling his promise to take his wife to visit the place where his late parents met amid the horrors of the Second World War, an almost magical journey that may lead him to change his mind.
These are tales that range wildly—a witchcraft trial during the Hundred Years War, a dispute with undocumented immigrants in the present-day United States, a bullet narrating the experience of a firing squad—from an author who has “create[d] methods of storytelling that enact, not merely record, a political vision, that fuse both the political and literary imaginations” (New York Times). A stunning new collection by a legendary writer who again explores how we struggle to keep love alive in even the darkest times.
Author
Ariel Dorfman
Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels The Suicide Museum (Other Press, 2023), Allegro (Other Press, 2025), Widows, and Konfidenz (Other Press, 2026), and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. He writes regularly for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, El País, and CNN. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Threepenny Review, and Index on Censorship, among others. A prominent human rights activist, he worked as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende’s chief of staff in the final months before the 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He lives with his wife Angélica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.
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