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An Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013: Top 100/Editors' Pick
"Captivating . . . a story of blood, hatred, vengeance, and politics."—Radio-Canada
Alberto Ventura has travelled to Chile to attend the funeral of his father, Roberto. A man hated and loved both by his family and the local people, Roberto was known in the village as an enigma, a rake, a controversial boss, and a quick-tempered thug. It's said that he has destroyed the family land by mass-farming eucalyptus trees, and he's known to have killed a local boy in a fit of rage. Yet as Alberto delves into the rumours that obscure his father's death—was it natural causes, vengeance, murder, or self-sacrifice?—he finds the reputation at stake is his own.
In a breath-catching story of race and identity, rife with Chile's centuries-old tension between natives and local landowners, Mauricio Segura's Eucalyptus investigates the flashpoint of one village community in an expanding world.
"Well-executed, with a cinematic quality and keen visual sense … Segura locates the political through the personal in a way that is uncommon."—Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books
"A solid novelist of infallible instincts."—L'Actualité
”Segura writes with a poetic economy of language, using very few words to create meaningful images … Winkler's masterful translation is so seamless, readers will think that the novel was written in English … Segura's novel and his original voice are important additions to the Canadian canon.”—Publishers Weekly
"An adventurous, hypnotic read.”—Ben Woodard, Numéro Cinq
"The book, originally written in French, is about a Chilean-Canadian man who has returned to his native country to bury his father. Perhaps this international hopscotch begins to describe the magic I felt when opening Eucalyptus ... a beautiful book."—A Geography of Reading
"Briskly paced ... The short novel reflects on the vital relation of exile (from one’s country, as well as one’s past) to such redemptive modes as love, atonement, and belonging. The fulfillment of Alberto’s quest to understand his father squares with Segura’s strong affirmation of charity and compassion, virtues capable of healing troubled pasts."—The Montreal Review of Books
"Ably translated, well-paced, teeming with interesting characters that often speak for whole chapters, and written in a prose that is both lucid and hallucinatory, Eucalyptus is a remarkable, thought-provoking novel with the accessibility of a page-turner.”—The Rover
Born in Chile in 1969, Mauricio Segura grew up in Montreal and studied at Université de Montréal and McGill University. A well-known journalist and documentary filmmaker, he is the author of three novels and a study of French perceptions of Latin America. His novel Black Alley, published by Biblioasis in 2010, was widely praised as “a gritty look at multiculturalism in practice” (Noah Richler, CBC Radio) that exerts “an urgent complicity rarely seen in other works about racial tensions, multiculturalism and the immigrant experience” (Words Without Borders).
Mauricio Segura lives with his family in Montreal.
Donald Winkler is a Montreal-based literary translator and documentary filmmaker. He has translated books by the astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, the philosopher Georges Leroux and the novelists Daniel Poliquin and Nadine Bismuth. Winkler is a two-time winner of the Governor General's Award.