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Hades, Argentina

ebook / ISBN-13: 9780349994062

Price: £9.99

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‘An astonishingly powerful novel about the complex nature of guilt’ Colm Tóibín

‘Remarkable . . . It will stay with me for a very long time’ Kamila Shamsie

A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love.


In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both?

It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him, however, so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.

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Reviews

An astonishingly powerful novel about the complex nature of guilt
Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
A voyage to the underworld could easily become outlandish, or, conversely, too familiar - trapped in the worn formulas of myth or magical-realist tropes. In Hades, Argentina, though, hell is at once metaphor and setting, literary conceit and emotional reality. Tomas's sojourn there is a fittingly moving tribute to the author's sister and her many fellow victims
Economist
Strange, gorgeous, and terrifying - a book for the grievers, and for those of us who wish we could turn back time to remedy past mistakes - and so, for all of us
R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
A remarkable novel, as imaginatively bold as it is morally complex. It will stay with me for a very long time
Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire
Mesmerising . . . Loedel's unflinching look at human frailty adds a revelatory new chapter to South American Cold War literature
Publishers Weekly
Part historical novel, part ghost story, Daniel Loedel's Hades, Argentina is a debut novel as impressive as they come. Tough, wily, dreamlike, it explores the sometimes principled and sometimes dubious choices made by a small circle of friends during the Argentine military dictatorship of the late 1970s . . . spellbinding
Seattle Times
Elegant, searching . . . Amid echoes of the Orpheus myth and swirls of magic . . . a descent into an underworld of memory and brutality
O: The Oprah Magazine