The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Pern (Paperback)

1975. The cusp of Argentina’s Dirty War. The magnate, Fausto Tamerlán, has been kidnapped by guerrillas, who as part of their ransom demands have stipulated the placement of a bust of Eva Perón in all ninety-two offices of Argentina’s leading construction company, Tamerlán & Sons. Tamerlán’s head of procurement, Ernesto Marroné, is the man tasked with the job, but he soon finds out that his is a mission for executives of a heroic disposition. His subsequent picaresque journey plunges him into a world of occupied factories, the slums of Buenos Aires and the utopian Evita City. Equipped with his trusty copy of Don Quixote: The Executive-Errant, Marroné is a modern knight who finds himself forced to penetrate the ultimate Argentinian mystery: Eva Perón – that maid of myth and legend whom we know as Evita. A stand-alone novel in its own right but also a prequel to his first novel, The Islands (And Other Stories, 2012), Carlos Gamerro’s caustic and utterly original novel is a shattered window onto Argentina’s recent past.

Carlos Gamerro is one of the best-known and most highly regarded contemporary Argentine writers. Born in Buenos Aires in 1962, he has published six works of fiction, including the novels The Islands (And Other Stories, 2012 UK and 2014 North American publication), An Open Secret (Pushkin Press, 2011) and The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón (And Other Stories, 2015). He adapted The Islands for a major theatrical production in 2011 and writes influential works of criticism. In addition Gamerro, who was brought up bilingually in English and Spanish, has translated Shakespeare, Auden, and Harold Bloom.

Ian Barnett has lived in Buenos Aires since 1991, translating and promoting many Argentinian and other South American writers. He collaborates closely with Carlos Gamerro and has already translated Gamerro’s The Islands (And Other Stories, 2012) and An Open Secret. Reviews of The Islands often made a point of praising his inventive, athletic "feat of translation" (Observer UK). 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.