MY TENDER MATADOR (Pushkin Press, £10.99), by Chilean writer, activist, and performance artist Pedro Lemebel, begins in Santiago, Chile, in the spring of 1986. The narrative, skilfully translated by Katherine Silver, unfolds days before the 13th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, which commenced following the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government by a coup d’etat supported by the US on September 11 1973.

At the heart of the novel is the Queen of the Corner, an endearing queer man who lives in a scrawny house in a lower-class Santiago neighbourhood and who embroiders tablecloths and napkins to subsist.

He falls in love with a revolutionary hero called Carlos, a university student who mysteriously appears in his life by hiding some boxes in the Queen’s room on the house’s rooftop.