Book description
Red April 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 counterinsurgence. Mother-haunted, wife-abandoned,
literature-loving, quietly eccentric Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a
hapless, by-the-book, unambitious prosecutor living in Lima. Until now
he has lived a life in which nothing exceptionally good or bad has
ever happened to him. But, inexplicably, he has been put in charge of
a bizarre and horrible murder investigation. As it unfolds by
propulsive twists and turns - full of paradoxes and surprises -
Saldivar is compelled to confront what happens to a man and society
when death becomes the only certainty. Remarkable for its self-assured
and nimble clarity of style, Red April is at once riveting and profound.
