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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Figuring out the truth in post-dictatorship Chile
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
The Remainder
by Alia Trabucco Zeran
(And Other Stories, £10)
AT LEAST 3,000 people are officially recognised as disappeared or killed in Chile between 1973 and 1990, after the armed forces headed by General Augusto Pinochet took power from the elected government of president Salvador Allende in a bloody military coup.
The brutal regime was also responsible for the imprisonment and torture of around 40,000 survivors. Thousands of them and relatives of those disappeared still search for truth, justice and reparation and The Remainder, a debut novel by the young Chilean writer Alia Trabucco Zeran, tells the story of three broken children of former militants.
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