The Devil's Country

This novel unravels a tale of vengeance and vigilante justice at the hands of an unlikely heroine, a fourteen year-old girl named Lum Hué, daughter of a white man and a Mapuche mother, and sole survivor of the massacre of her village by five white soldiers. With a minimalist prose that has become the trademark of Suez’s narrative fiction, the novel unfolds at a vertiginous pace. A recurring theme in Suez’s fiction is authoritarianism, specifically the imposition of power over the weak and defenseless. A fan of Quentin Tarantino films, Suez refers to The Devil’s Country as her Patagonian Western.

Perla Suez was born in Córdoba, Argentina, but lived the first fifteen years of her life in Basavilbaso in the province of Entre Ríos, a crucial period that informs her narrative fiction. She is a writer and professor of contemporary literature and received a university degree in literature from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. In 2015, her novel El país del diablo (2014) received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize. Her works have been translated to English, French, Italian, Serbian, and Turkish.

Rhonda Dahl Buchanan is a Professor of Spanish and the Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Louisville. She has translated the narrative fiction of the Argentine writers Ana María Shua, Perla Suez, Tununa Mercado, and Mempo Giardinelli, and the Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez, among others, and is the author of numerous critical studies on contemporary Latin American writers.