From the Darkness (Guatemala)
ISBN: 9780955233944 Price: £8.95 Click image to BUY
By Oswaldo Salazar
Translated by Gavin O’Toole
IT IS THE spring of 1939 and a man dies in agony at the San Juan de Dios de Amatitlán Hospital outside Guatemala City. His wife and children are accused of poisoning him, shattering the calm of a land kept in fearful order by the authoritarian president Jorge Ubico.
One of the few Central American novels to explore the region’s criminal history, From the Darkness is a captivating story of a murder and the ensuing judicial investigation that became known as ‘The Gourd Poisoning’ in a society unprepared for a crime that lay outside its powers of reasoning.
Salazar explores the bitterly unhappy circumstances that can make a woman kill, and the unforgiving quality of male justice.
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‘From the Darkness has a magnificent narrative quality, exposition and style as well as a forceful central character, delivering the unexpected features of a species of crime novel within a work of historical reconstruction.’
- Carlos Montemayor, Mexican novelist
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Latin American Review of Books