Chile

“It is wholly original. It’s the unpicking of four rather mundane but awful stories of acts of killing involving women. It’s taking the events of many decades ago and reviewing them with reference to a new set of understandings and the values of today. This book has a particular gendered aspect that is incredibly significant in explaining to us the circumstances in which, in Chile, society came down like a ton of bricks on individual women who, for one reason or another, found themselves in a situation in which they were involved in an act of killing…It’s also sublimely written.” Read more...

The British Academy Book Prize: 2022 Shortlist

Philippe Sands, Lawyer

“A story from Chile, mainly Santiago. It’s highly original, very political, with a totally wonderful use of words. The words are perfectly turned. It’s one of those books where the skill of the wordsmithery tumbles you into new stories, into shared experiences. Again, a very, very lyrical translation as well.” Read more...

The Best Novels in Translation: the 2019 Booker International Prize

Bettany Hughes, Broadcaster

“It is about a Chilean woman, Paulina, who meets someone through her husband whose voice she recognises as her torturer…I would also say that the reason I selected it is because the play addresses the dilemma of what you do to the torturer and what the torture victim is entitled to when the nightmare of the torture-based regime is over and a state is trying to reorganise itself along democratic and more humane lines. I think the play shows very starkly that kind of dilemma that societies experience.” Read more...

The best books on Torture

Juan Mendez, Lawyer

“Bello was born in Caracas in the 1780s. He was Simon Bolivar’s tutor. He then came to London in 1810 as part of a diplomatic mission to try and persuade the British to support the Venezuelans in their recent struggle with Spain for independence or at least self-government. He then stayed for nearly 20 years in London, living in Euston in conditions of some penury, working with James Mill and Jeremy Bentham…This excellent biography shows – not unlike the Cañizares volume – how ideas were shared to an appreciable degree across North and South Atlantic worlds. Bello’s inaugural speech in Santiago, for instance, is very similar in approach to that of Cardinal Newman’s ‘Idea of a University’.” Read more...

The best books on Latin American History

James Dunkerley, Political Scientist

“He has brought together a group of researchers who look at what happened in various sectors in the economy try to explore what had been the benefits and drawbacks of this period of democracy.” Read more...

The best books on Pinochet and Chilean Politics

Alan Angell, Political Scientist

“Dorfman is a well-known playwright. People will know about his play Death of the Maiden and he has written a lot of novels. And this is his autobiography. It is the story of a peripatetic intellectual — he wandered all over the place. He was born in Argentina and spent a long time in the United States. I think what he does extremely well is to give us an insider’s view of what is happening. But he also has the perspective of someone who is looking at it from the outside. He speaks and writes in English as well as he speaks and writes in Spanish. He was very involved in the cultural side of the Allende period. A lot of things happened in Chile during the Allende years and one of the impressive ones was the cultural innovations that were taking place in song, painting, theatre and in writing. What this book does is show you what it was like to be an intellectual at a time of great social turmoil. He is looking into where his roots are. It is a very personal as well as a very political book.” Read more...

The best books on Pinochet and Chilean Politics

Alan Angell, Political Scientist

“Patricia actually wrote it in 1985 towards the end of Pinochet’s regime. So it’s a courageous book because to publish books in Chile which might be seen to contain critical material was not an easy decision to make. What she does is look at a whole spectrum of people: from powerful people with money on the right, to the poorest of the poor peasants. Through their stories she reconstructed their lives and beliefs. I found it an extraordinarily moving book. The last chapter deals with the case of José Tohá, one of Allende’s ministers who was starved to death in a military hospital. His widow, because they were friends of the family, goes to Pinochet to try to find out what happened. I was actually moved to tears in this chapter because it is this woman’s attempt to come to terms with the dreadful things that have happened to her husband at the hands of someone they thought of as a friend.” Read more...

The best books on Pinochet and Chilean Politics

Alan Angell, Political Scientist

“This is an extraordinarily moving book. It tells the story of people who, in the most appalling circumstances, tried to defend liberty. Not people who were necessarily very much on the left, but just ordinary decent democrats…He focuses on key episodes, like the assassination attempt on Pinochet in 1986 and what that meant. There is a great deal on the church. Although the church in Chile is a very conservative institution now, it had a strong line on human rights. For the first ten years of the dictatorship, before the economic crisis of 1982/3, the only real internal opposition to the abuses of the regime came from the Catholic Church.” Read more...

The best books on Pinochet and Chilean Politics

Alan Angell, Political Scientist

“Basically, there have been a number of ways of defending the Pinochet regime. You can say that it was necessary to deal with the turmoil of the Allende years. You can say that Pinochet ran the economy well and so on. What this book does is seek to destroy all these kinds of justifications. Running through the whole book is a sustained attack on the legitimacy of Pinochet’s regime and its attempts to portray itself as a genuine reformer in Chile. There is a lot on the human rights episodes. So it is a very effective demolition of any kind of attempt to justify what went on in those years. It is extraordinarily well-documented and impeccable academically. And it is also very good on how clever Pinochet was at managing to stay in power during all those years. He was the commander-in-chief of the army and nothing happened without his say-so. “ Read more...

The best books on Pinochet and Chilean Politics

Alan Angell, Political Scientist