Among the Lost - Softcover

Monge, Emiliano

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911344641 ISBN 13: 9781911344643

Publisher: Scribe UK, 2018

Synopsis

In the desolate wastelands between the sierra and the jungle, under an all-seeing, unforgiving sun, a single day unfolds as relentlessly as those that have gone before. People are trafficked and brutalised, illegal migrants are cheated of their money, their dreams, their very names, even as countless others scrabble to cross the border, trying to reach a land they call El Paraiso.

In this grim inferno, a fierce love has blossomed one that was born in pain and cruelty, and one that will live or die on this day. Estela and Epitafio too were trafficked, they grew together in the brutal orphanage, fell in love, but were ripped apart. They have played an ugly role in the very system that abused them, and done the bidding of the brutal old priest for too long. They have traded in migrants, put children to work as slaves, hacked off limbs and lives without a thought, though they have never forgotten the memory of their own shackles.

Like the immigrants whose hopes they extinguish, they long to be free; free to be together and alone. Here in an unnamed land that could be a Mexico reimagined by Breughel and Dante, on the border between purgatory and inferno, where Paradise is the mouth of hell and cruelty the only currency, lives are spent, bartered and indentured for it. Must all be bankrupt among the lost?

About this title

Review

'In an odyssey of relentless human cruelty, Emiliano Monge, one of the many linguistically adroit writers currently at work in what is an exciting era for Mexican fiction, spares no one. That he can succeed in generating any sympathy for his frenetic lovers is entirely due to the ferocious eloquence of his prose, which has been magnificently well served by translator Frank Wynne's Miltonic register. Filtered through a wry, if urgent, continuous present tense, it conveys the inhumanity of the jungle and desert landscapes ... Monge's realist, deadly topical fiction is a weighty metaphor for our world gone mad. His characters, however depraved, often reveal traces of empathy, self-doubt, even suppressed horror.' --Eileen Battersby, The Observer

About the Author

Emiliano Monge is a multi-award-winning Mexican novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and reporter. In 2011, the Guadalajara International Book Fair FIL chose him as one of the top 25 best-kept secrets in contemporary Latin American literature, and more recently he was selected for México20, a list of twenty important young Mexican authors chosen by The British Council, FIL, Hay Festival, and Conaculta.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribe UK
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1911344641
• ISBN 13: 9781911344643
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368