Luis Sagasti

Translated by Fionn Petch

How do we even begin to narrate the history of the world? Where do we start, and where do we end? Fireflies is Sagasti’s bold and original attempt to answer these questions. Taking an eclectic array of influences and personalities from modern history, he teases out events that at first glance seem random and insignificant and proceeds to weave them together masterfully, entertaining as he enlightens. Joseph Beuys, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Stanley Kubrick, Neil Armstrong, Wittgenstein, Glenn Miller and the Beatles; poets and authors, priests, astronauts and Russian sailors all make an appearance, and Sagasti finds common threads to bind their stories together.

 The fireflies themselves perhaps provide the key to understanding this book. They become a metaphor for the resistance of certain luminous moments, certain twinkling fragments of history, to the passing of time. They remind us that events do not always disappear neatly into the darkness, but rather remain, floating in the air, lighting up the night sky for years to come. Sagasti shows us that the present moment, like this novel, is a tapestry woven of a multiplicity of times.

Using his unique, poetic and keenly observant style, Sagasti turns the accidents of history into a single, lyrical constellation, and for the reader it’s an extraordinary sight. 

Renato Cisneros

Translated by Fionn Petch

If I succeed in understanding who he was before I was born, perhaps I will be able to understand who I am now that he is dead…

In this sprawling family saga stretching across Latin America, a son embarks on a journey to understand his complex relationship with his father and how it shaped the man he is today.  Recalling Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits, the renowned journalist and writer Renato Cisneros probes deep into his own family history to try and come to terms with his father, General Luis Federico ‘The Gaucho’ Cisneros, a leading, controversial figure in the oppressive military regime that held power in Peru during the 1970s and 1980s, a tortuous period marked by state-sanctioned terrorism and the rise of the Shining Path.

Selling over 35,000 copies in Peru alone, The Distance Between Us is at once excruciating in its honesty and deeply moving in its universal relevance. Winner of the Prix Transfuge du Meilleur Roman de Littérature Hispanique 2017, finalist for the Vargas Llosa Biannual Award and longlisted for the Prix Médicis Étranger 2017, it is now available in English for the first time.

‘This is a book to set alongside Philip Roth’s Patrimony, Héctor Abad’s Oblivion, Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, Martin Amis’s Experience, Albert Camus’ The First Man, and of course Kafka’s Letter to His Father.’ Thierry Clermont, Le Figaro

‘This is an impressive book. In writing it the author demonstrates great talent, as well as great courage.’ 
Mario Vargas Llosa

‘No one that reads this book will be able to look at their family in the same way again.’
 Gabriela Wiener

‘An extraordinary family story... Renato Cisneros delivers here the captivating narrative of a strange and disturbing filiation.
 A loving and lucid puzzle.’ 
Le Monde (France)

‘People should read this novel to learn more about themselves.’ Jorge Edwards

‘Cisneros is a phenomenon in Latin America today.’ Jesús Ruiz Mantilla, El País (Spain)

‘A book so intelligent and moving, you wish it would never end.’ Libération (France)

‘The Distance Between Us is the story of a villain told from love. It dwells in the humanity hidden behind the themes left by war. It also narrates that other war: the one which all of us wage against our parents to become the persons we are.’
 Santiago Roncagliolo

‘The Distance Between Us goes far and appeals to the reader exactly because there is so little distance between what is written and what was lived.’
 Alberto Fuguet

‘“Just as a father is never prepared to bury his son, a son is never prepared to dig up his father”(...) It is within this tension that this magnificent novel lies, full of drama and suspense from the very first page.’ Edmundo Paz Soldán

Renato Cisneros

Translated by Fionn Petch

Matías Roeder, a young man with an Italian father, German mother, and a sense of stagnation he is desperate to escape from, hops a boat from Peru to New York with vague plans but a firm intention to never go home again. This familiar story of migration—the odd jobs, the romances, the Bowery bars—goes sideways when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and he joins the US Air Force as part of a bombing crew. Matías is now Matthew, in the belly of a B-17, remade by the vertigo and rawness of aerial warfare. But the past comes roaring back when he trains his sights on his beloved grandfather’s hometown of Hamburg.  Matías’s reckoning unfolds in the interstices of other stories, swapped by two more Peruvians – a journalist and a cabdriver – stuck in a present-day Madrid traffic jam, whose lives in Lima are now as distant as World War II was to their homeland. The World We Saw Burning is both a striking account of war and a reflection on identity and uprootedness in a time when everything seems on the verge of exploding or disappearing forever.

Jorge Consiglio

Translated by Carolina Orloff and Fionn Petch

They inhabited a present that was weightless, fickle even, and yet at the same time effortlessly assembled; it was the very embodiment of something sound, something firm and tangible: a space of utter certainty...

This novel focuses on a group of characters who are all in different ways endeavouring to take control of their fate. Their desire to lead a genuine existence forces them to confront difficult decisions, and to break out of comfortable routines.

Karl and Marina have been together for ten years and have a young son, Simón. Karl is a German-born oboist at Argentina’s national orchestra, and Marina is a meteorologist. On a field trip, she meets fellow researcher Zárate, and what might have been just a fling starts to erode the foundations of her marriage. Then there is Amer, a dynamic and successful taxidermist. At a group therapy session for smokers, Amer falls for the younger Clara. While the relationship between Karl and Marina disintegrates, the love story between Amer and Clara is just beginning – or is it already at an end? 

One of Argentina’s leading contemporary writers, Jorge Consiglio portrays the inner worlds of these characters through the minute details of their everyday lives, laying bare their strivings and their frustrations with a wry gaze, and seeking in this close-up texture a deeper truth.

Luis Sagasti

Translated by Fionn Petch

In his final version of the Variations, Glenn Gould introduces a subtle, almost imperceptible change, breaking with the nocturnal circularity. As if he didn’t want the Count to sleep after all, condemning Goldberg to inhabit that wakeful night forever. The change occurs in the last beat of the final aria: an ornament that concludes the recording. Gould’s great contribution lies not in what he modifies, but in the very gesture of modification.

Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach’s Goldberg Variations, in Luis Sagasti’s second book to appear in English he takes on the role of Scheherazade to recount us story after story, interwoven in subtle and surprising ways to create a tapestry that vibrates to celestial harmonies. He leads us on a journey from the music born of the sun to the music sent into space on the Voyager mission, from Rothko to rock music, from the composers of the concentration camps to a weeping room for Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands.

A Musical Offering traverses the same shifting sands of fiction and history as the tales of Jorge Luis Borges, while also recalling the ‘constellation’ structure of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. Filled with insight and ideas yet unexpectedly tender and personal, it is a celebration of storytelling, of childhood, and of the transformative power of music.