Red April

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2011





Red April evokes Holy Week during a cruel, bloody, and terrifying time in Peru's history, shocking for its corrosive mix of assassination, bribery, intrigue, torture, and enforced disappearance - a war between grim, ideologically driven terrorism and morally bankrupt government counterinsurgence.





Mother-haunted, wife-abandoned, literature-loving, quietly eccentric Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a hapless, by-the-book, unambitious prosecutor living in Lima. Until now he has lived a life in which nothing exceptionally good or bad has ever happened to him. But, inexplicably, he has been put in charge of a bizarre and horrible murder investigation. As it unfolds by propulsive twists and turns - full of paradoxes and surprises - Saldivar is compelled to confront what happens to a man and society when death becomes the only certainty.





Remarkable for its self-assured and nimble clarity of style, Red April is at once riveting and profound.



Santiago Roncagliolo has been a screenwriter, investigative journalist and political adviser. He was born in Lima, Peru, and currently lives in Barcelona.





Edith Grossman is the award-winning translator of such masterworks as Cervantes's Don Quixote and Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.



A tour de force



Riveting... Red April is rooted in Peru's past and present, but resonates far beyond



The terrible story of a society without hope



Violence stalks the pages... A dark and almost unhinged display