The civil war which acts as a backdrop to the events in this book is the armed conflict in Roncaglioloâ€™s native country between the Government, the Communist Party (also known as Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path) and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.

Peruvian writer and journalist Santiago Roncagliolo did something similar with his crime thriller Red April (Abril Rojo), originally published in Spanish in 2006 and subsequently in an English rendition by veteran translator Edith Grossman (it won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2011). Zafonâ€™s bestselling novels have shown that how the Gothic, so often dismissed as â€˜mereâ€™ entertainment, can successfully engage with and comment on troublesome recent history. One could cite as an example Carlos Ruiz Zafonâ€™s â€œCemetery of Forgotten Booksâ€ series, haunted by the memories of the Spanish Civil War. As the New York Times declares, 'Lima is once again one of Latin America's brightest literary scenes.'From the Hardcover edition.How best to express the horrors of a bloody civil war whose memory is still painful? How can one probe into wounds which are still open and smarting? An answer might be provided by literature in general, and genre literature in particular. As it unfolds by propulsive twists and turns-full of paradoxes and surprises-Saldivar is compelled to confront what happens to a man and a society when death becomes the only certainty in life.Stunning for its self-assured and nimble clarity of style-reminiscent of classic noir fiction-the inexorable momentum of its plot, and the moral complexity of its concerns, Red April is at once riveting and profound, informed as it is by deft artistry in the shaping of conflict between competing venalities. But, inexplicably, he has been put in charge of a bizarre and horrible murder investigation. Until now he has lived a life in which nothing exceptionally good or bad has ever happened to him.

It evokes Holy Week during a cruel, bloody, and terrifying time in Peru's history, shocking for its corrosive mix of assassination, bribery, intrigue, torture, and enforced disappearance-a war between grim, ideologically-driven terrorism and morally bankrupt government counterinsurgency.Mother-haunted, wife-abandoned, literature-loving, quietly eccentric Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a hapless, by-the-book, unambitious prosecutor living in Lima. A chilling, internationally acclaimed political thriller, Red April is a grand achievement in contemporary Latin American fiction, written by the youngest winner ever of the Alfaguara Prize-one of the most prestigious in the Spanish-speaking world-and translated from the Spanish by one of our most celebrated literary translators, Edith Grossman.

Red april santiago roncagliolo