The Call
Portrait of an Argentine Woman
Leila Guerriero author Megan McDowell translator
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Pushkin Press
Publishing:11th Feb '27
£25.00
This title is due to be published on 11th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Buenos Aires, 1976: anti-dictatorship militant Silvia Labayru is kidnapped by paramilitary soldiers and taken to a clandestine detention centre. She is twenty years old, and five months pregnant. There she is tortured, gives birth on a table, is repeatedly abused by an officer and forced to collaborate in a military operation that results in the disappearance of five people. From the start, Labayru is certain she will be killed, until she is granted a phone call to her father that changes everything. Over a year later, she is freed and goes into exile in Madrid, thinking that the hell is over. Yet she is fiercely condemned by her fellow Argentines as a collaborator, insistently faced with the question: what did you do to survive? Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero spent two years interviewing Labayru and her family, friends, children, lovers, and ex-militants. Accounts conflict, memories falter, interviews veer from seemingly stray details to the most profound experiences of terror and suffering, and Guerriero weaves it all into an astonishingly multi-faceted, complex portrait of Labayru. This is a story of the very limit points of human experience, of violence, captivity and struggle; but it also becomes a story of love, reconciliation and survival in the face of extremity.
Infused with the intensity of a thriller and with such poetic force, The Call is a masterclass. A hundred years from now, we'll still be talking about this tour de force -- Samanta Schweblin, author of 'Fever Dream'
Stunning, overwhelming and utterly, brilliantly, painfully affecting -- Philippe Sands, author of 'East West Street'
This book is crucial to an understanding of the devastation wrought by authoritarianism. A woman who was used as a spoil of war, who was exploited and later maligned--this enigmatic woman, Silvia, bares herself to Leila Guerriero's insatiable curiosity and intelligence. It's an unforgettable encounter, and a contemporary classic -- Mariana Enríquez, author of 'Our Share of Night'
I would have lost my way in this dark forest of brutality and suffering, if it weren't for the steady lamp, up ahead, of Guerriero's attention, her quiet persistence, her self-effacing comradeship with a broken but unyielding soul -- Helen Garner, author of 'This House of Grief'
A masterpiece of this millenium, capable of renegotiating the terms of what literature is today... One of the most powerful books I've read in recent years -- Veronia Raimo, author of 'Lost on Me'
One of the great journalists in Spanish... The Call left a profound impression on me -- Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of 'The Sound of Things Falling'
Leila Guerriero is one of the most significant voices in Latin American journalism, a writer of uncommon depth and bravery. Her newest work, The Call, is an instant classic: a riveting tale of Argentina's most complicated and traumatic years, and a portrait of the idealists whose youth was marked by radicalism and political violence. The Call reads like a novel, a page-turner, a mystery, and a vindication all at once -- Daniel Alarcón, author of 'At Night We Walk in Circles'
Guerriero has painted a masterful and intimate portrait, disturbingly universal, which reveals abysses of suffering and helplessness, but where, despite everything, there is still space for redemption -- Agustina Bazterrica, author of 'Tender is the Flesh'
This new masterpiece finally squares the circle of the best literary non-fiction in Spanish... Guerriero has taken journalism to a new frontier... There is no judgement. There are facts, versions of facts, and the moral, that is, the thoughtful meditation on the fatal, ambiguous dilemma between death and survival in a pure, dark present. There is high literature. I know that reading The Call, so addictive, will stay with me forever * El Pais, Best Book of 2024 *
Goes far beyond a portrait or a profile of Silvia Labayru: The Call is a book about love, violence, journalistic ethics, the truth and the terror of its scope. It is a classic - I write it without reservation - that rubs shoulders with and often looks over The Power Broker, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, The Year of Magical Thinking and other timeless works of narrative journalism * Casa Macondo *
Fragmented and multifaceted, this is a monumental portrait of terror and survival * El Cultural, Best Books of 2024 *
ISBN: 9781805333029
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
416 pages