Ways of Going Home

Product Description Growing up in 1980s Chile, a young boy plays hide and seek in the suburbs of Santiago with his friends while the adults become slowly entangled in the brutality of Pinochet's regime - accomplices and victims of the brutal dictatorship. As the country shudders under authoritarian rule, the boy creates stories of his own to explain the sporadic scenes of violence, the disappearances, and the deafening silence of his mother and father. Until, on the night of the Santiago earthquake, a mysterious girl named Claudia appears among the children and the boy's world is changed forever. Now, as a young man reflecting on the tragedies of his childhood, he must find the courage to confront as an adult what he could not have known as a child, and to untangle Chile's troubled past. As he struggles to begin a novel which will encompass the clash between innocence and complicity, the boundaries between fiction and reality blur and the beautiful Claudia comes back into his life. Review "Complex yet sophisticated, the novel places Zambra at the spearhead of a new Chilean fiction and sets him alongside other Latin American writers such as Colombia s Juan Gabriel Vasquez, who weave some of the continent s most difficult historical themes into an exciting modern art form." --Observer "Ways of Going Home manages, in its sparse, moving, constantly smoking cool-eyed Chilean way, to add up to a stark and timely study of fiction, truth, memory, family, revolution, secrets, lies, sex, Pinochet and death ... A wonderful book." --Dazed & Confused "Rising through the ranks of Latin American literature is Alejandro Zambra, a writer from Chile who has won over critics with his captivating work ... Thought-provoking and inspiring, the book also echoes some of the author s own nostalgia of growing up during that turbulent time." --Manchester Evening News "Zambra cannot simply be pigeonholed as a Spanish-Language writer. His concerns and influences are broader, and in the meditative, discursive timbre of the writing readers may recognise an affinity with other voices such as Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole ... Brief but notable. -Sunday Telegraph" "Still in his thirties, the novelist, poet and critic Alejandro Zambra is considered by many to be one of Chile s finest writers. Ways of Going Home is deceptively slight and finely wrought: it is both a wistful look at Chile s recent political history and a metafictional reflection on the nature of writing." --Times Literary Supplement "A brief but brilliant coming of age novel from Chile. Zambra mixes fiction with reality, recalling Santiago of the 1980s, the Pinochet regime and the violence that came with it." --Big Issue A slim but thrilling novel from one of Chile's outstanding young writers ... Zambra's tightly crafted work explores the themes of childhood, disappointment, and the impossibility of ever returning home. --'Books of the year so far', Financial Times "A brief but brilliant coming of age novel from Chile. Zambra mixes fiction with reality, recalling Santiago of the 1980s, the Pinochet regime and the violence that came with it." --Big Issue All year I've been telling people to read Zambra's brilliant new novel. --'Books of the Year', Adam Thirlwell, TLS About the Author ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA is the author of the poetry collections Bahia inutil and Mudanza, the novels Bonsai, which won the Critics Prize and the National Council Prize for Books for the best novel of the year, La vida privada de los arboles (The Private Lives of Trees) and the book of essays No leer (2010). Ways of Going Home was the winner of the Altazor Prize and the Consejo Nacional del Libro Prize, both for the best 2011 Chilean novel. He lives in Santiago and is a literature professor at the University Diego Portales.