ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
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Land of Smoke signals rediscovery of a great Latin-American writer
Audacious: Sara Gallardo
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
Land of Smoke
by Sara Gallardo
(Pushkin Press, £12)
TO READ this collection of masterfully crafted short stories by Sara Gallardo, first published in 1977 and now translated for the first time into English by Jessica Sequeira, is to be immersed in a dazzling and at times hallucinatory world.
Gallardo, scion of a patrician family of Spanish origin in Argentina, was a descendant of Bartolome Mitre, President of Argentina from 1862 to 1868, and the name of her grandfather Angel Gallardo, a civil engineer, scientist and politician, now adorns a busy subway station in Buenos Aires.
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