| 1975. The cusp of Argentina's Dirty War. The magnate, Fausto Tamerlan, has been kidnapped by guerrillas, who as part of their ransom demands have stipulated the placement of a bust of Eva Peron in all ninety-two offices of Argentina's leading construction company, Tamerlan's Sons. Tamerlan's head of procurement, Ernesto Marrone, is the man tasked with the job, but he soon finds out that his is a mission for executives of a heroic disposition. His subsequent picaresque journey plunges him into a world of occupied factories, the slums of Buenos Aires and the utopian Evita City. Equipped with his trusty copy of Don Quixote: The Executive-Errant, Marrone is a modern knight who finds himself forced to penetrate the ultimate Argentinian mystery: Eva Peron - that maid of myth and legend whom we know as Evita. A stand-alone novel in its own right but also a prequel to his first novel, The Islands (And Other Stories, 2012), Carlos Gamerro's caustic and utterly original novel is a shattered window onto Argentina's recent past. |
