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"Exhilarating, inventive, and consistently absorbing."—The Guardian
Buenos Aires, 1992. Hacker Felipe Félix is summoned to the twin towers of magnate Fausto Tamerlán and charged with finding witnesses to a very public crime. Refusal is not an option. After a decade immersed in virtual realities, trying to forget the Falklands War, Félix has to confront the city.
Detective novel, cyber-thriller, inner-city road trip, and war memoir, The Islands is a hilarious, devastating, and dizzyingly surreal account of a history that remains raw.
Carlos Gamerro, born in 1962, is one of the most highly regarded contemporary Argentine writers.
"Carlos Gamerro has written one of the most ambitious novels about the war." Jonathan Blitzer, The Nation
"Gamerro picks history’s what-the-fuck moments, which when found in fiction are so strange as to knock the reader momentarily out of the imaginary world." Ben Bollig, The Guardian
"Exhilarating, inventive and consistently absorbing." Stuart Evers, The Guardian
"A bravura piece of writing, with a cinematic sweep, sustained drama, and pitch-perfect dialogue." Martin Schifino, The Independent
"The reader is dragged headlong by Barnett’s athletic translation … a highly addictive comic voice, its peaks of hectic farce underlaid by a delicate, deadpan absurdism." Lorna Scott Fox, TLS
"A weird and wonderful thriller … rife with surreal horror and rampant bad taste." Anthony Cummins, The Observer
"A genre-bending book." Anne McElvoy, BBC Radio 3, Night Waves
"A generational, landmark novel." Andrew Graham Yooll, BBC Radio 3, Feature: Malvinas Madness
"A danger-laden, mind-bending and ultimately redemptive quest. [...] There are more ideas here than most writers would fit in 10 novels." Tom Bunstead, The Independent on Sunday
"I urge you to find and read a copy of this important novel." Matthew Crockatt, Huffington Post UK
"A complex and ambitious exploration of how history is memorialized." Michael Sopp, The Literateur
"A dark and uproarious novel." Untitled Books
"Gamerro displays great lyricism in his descriptions of the land of la pampa. He has a poet’s touch on the visions and themes he explores throughout the story. It’s a triumph." Ed Hart, Sounds and Colours
"Gamerro’s balls-out novel is a delirious mash-up … [His] gross, bleakly funny, violence-saturated satire of a psychologically damaged society hung up on impossible myth relies on epic hyperbole, masterfully translated by Ian Barnett. There is enough invention here for four novels, but this multilayered nightmare vision is deftly rendered and devastating in its intensity." Siobhan Murphy, Metro
Carlos Gamerro was born in Buenos Aires in 1962. He has published the novels Las Islas (1998), El sueño del señor juez (2000), El secreto y las voces (2002), La aventura de los bustos de Eva (2004), Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara (2010) and the book of short stories El libro de los afectos raros (2005). His literary criticism includes the books El nacimiento de la literatura argentina (2006), Ulises: claves de lectura (2008) and Ficciones barrocas: una lectura de Borges, Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Cortázar, Onetti y Felisberto Hernández (2010). He has translated into Spanish Graham Greene’s A World of One’s Own, W.H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand, Harold Bloom’s Poetry and Repression, and William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Hamlet. The English versions of his novels An Open Secret (Pushkin Press, 2011) and The Islands (And Other Stories, 2012) were done in collaboration with his regular translator Ian Barnett. He has also co-authored the film script for the movie Tres de corazones (Sergio Renán, 2007)and the Catalogue for the 11th Lyon Biennale (2011). He has also written the theatrical version of his novel Las Islas, which premiered at the Teatro Alvear in Buenos Aires, directed by Alejandro Tantanian (2011). In 2012 he participated in the Edinburgh World Writer’s Conference.
Jimmy Burns: Jimmy Burns was born in Madrid in 1953. Jimmy contributes to Spanish language media outlets and publishes his books in Spanish translation as Jimmy Burns Maranon. He was the only full-time British foreign correspondent to remain in Argentina prior to, during, and well beyond the Falklands war.
Ian Barnett: Ian Barnett has been translating from Spanish and French into English since 1994. He studied French literature and linguistics, and graduated from St. Catherine's College, Oxford University. He is a lecturer of the Masters Program in Translation at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires.