Evelio Rosero – författare

When Father Almida is summoned to an audience with the parish''s principal benefactor, a stand-in is found in Father Matamoros, a drunkard with an angel''s voice whose sung mass is mesmerizing to all. But Matamoros hides a darker side, and when the church''s residents throw a feast for him he encourages them to lose all their inhibitions and give free reign to their most Bacchanalian desires. A satire on the iniquities of the Catholic church in Colombia, Good Offices is at once comic, surreal and startling, a novel that will linger long in the mind.

In a small town in the mountains of Colombia, Ismael, a retired teacher, spends his mornings gathering oranges in the sunshine and spying on his neighbour as she sunbathes naked in her garden.Returning from a walk one morning he discovers that his wife has disappeared. Then more people go missing, and not-so-distant gunfire signals the approach of war. Most of the villagers make their escape, but Ismael cannot leave without his Otilia. He becomes an unwilling witness to the senseless civil war that sweeps through his country with a tragic inevitability. In The Armies Rosero has created a hallucinatory, relentless, captivating narrative often as violent as the events it describes, told by an old man battered by a reality he no longer recognizes.

A chilling allegorical novella by the masterful Colombian writer who poses timeless questions about violence and subjugation, power and freedom.Imagining the darkest of power imbalances in a dystopian world, in which the most vulnerable are held captive and wherein survival depends on the ability to remain anonymous, identity is a threat. Those who have everything would revel in the humiliation of others and identification brings with it the ultimate punishment. When hiding is no longer possible, the only choice may be to rebel.More frightening than the dystopia of Ishiguro''s Never Let Me Go and with elements of the surreal to rival Kafka''s Metamorphosis, Rosero''s hypnotic tale builds in tension to deliver a crippling emotional punch.