Tomas Eloy Martinez – författare

Eva Peron entered immortality on 26th July, 1952. The bizarre after-life of her embalmed body - hidden, hijacked, replicated, smuggled abroad, buried, resurrected, repatriated - echoed her equally strange life. From the story of the plain poor-trash girl who reinvented herself to become first the uncrowned queen of Argentina's masses and then their uncanonized saint, Tomas Eloy Martinez has created a mesmerizing, highly readable work of fiction.

Bruno Cadogan has flown from New York to Buenos Aires in search of the elusive and legendary Julio Martel, a tango singer whose voice has never been recorded yet is said to be so beautiful it is almost supernatural. Bruno is increasingly drawn to the mystery of Martel and his strange and evocative performances in a series of apparently arbitrary sites around the city. As Bruno tries to find Martel, he begins to untangle the story of the singer's life, and to believe that Martel's increasingly rare performances map a dark labyrinth of the city's past.

Simón Cardoso has been dead for thirty years when his wife, Emilia Dupuy, finds him in a New Jersey diner. Testimonies confirmed that Simón had been one of the thousands of victims of Argentina's military regime, executed for being a 'subversive'; yet this man is identical to the man she lost three decades ago. While skirting around the mystery, Eloy Martínez masterfully peels away layer upon layer of history - both personal and political. And just as Simón's disappearance comes to represent the thousands of disappearances that were such a common occurrence during the dictatorship, so Emilia's refusal to accept his death mirrors the country's unwillingness to face its reality.The final work of the late Martínez, Purgatory is his most moving, most autobiographical novel.