Charco Press is an award-winning Edinburgh-based publisher focused on bringing the best Latin American authors to English-speaking readers.
Charco won Scottish Small Press of the Year in the 2019 British Book Awards, and in just three years of publishing has had two finalists for the prestigious International Booker Prize, including The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, currently shortlisted for the 2020 prize.
Another Charco title, The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada was the winner of the 2019 EIBF First Book Award, as voted for by the public.
Not a police chronicle, not a thriller, but a contemporary noir novel of the ongoing catastrophe of femicide and the murder of three young women in interior of Argentina.
In a unique reformulation of history and literary tradition, Gabriela Cabezon Camara, with humour and sophistication, re-writes Martin Fierro from a feminist, LGBT, postcolonial point of view. She creates a hilarious novel that is nevertheless incisive in its criticism of the way societies come into being, and the way they venerate mythical heroes.
Lucia and Pablo are a couple, school teachers who left Colombia to make a living in the US. While Pablo keeps fond memories of his motherland and a close relationship with his family, Lucia rejects all notions of patriotism and nostalgia. After struggling to conceive for a long time, Lucia finally gets pregnant with twins - but shuts Pablo out.
Immersed in their loneliness and existential confusion, the lives of three characters intermingle in an exquisitely written, captivating novel which attempts to narrate that fleeting, and intrinsically profound, moment in our adult lives when we look in the mirror and discover that we don't like what we see, or no longer recognise ourselves.
This is a story narrated from the point of view of a nine-year old girl, called Tamara, who takes in the intricacies of the survival strategies of the world she inherits, marked by poverty, unspeakable trauma, and inescapable scenarios.
Sagasti narrates for us a thousand and one stories centre around music that take the reader from Bach to Gould, from Gould to the Beatles, from Sergeant Pepper to the music that was played in Nazi concentration camps, and so on.. But when do we end a story? When do we decide to sing the final lullaby?
An Orphan World is about poverty, and the resourceful ways in which people confront poverty. At the same time, it is a reflection about the body as a space of pleasure and violence. Perhaps above all else, An Orphan World is a brutally honest love letter between a father and son.
In a patch of dilapidated French countryside, a woman struggles with the demons of her multitudinous internal conflicts. Embracing exclusion, yet desiring to belong, craving freedom whilst feeling trapped, yearning for family life and simultaneously wanting to burn the entire facade down.
In Feebleminded, Harwicz drags us to the most uncomfortable and fascinating aspects of love, need and dependency, by analysing the dynamics between a mother and her adult daughter, both searching through their own past and present as they try to give meaning to their lives and relationship.
How do we even begin to narrate history? Using an eclectic array of influences and personalities from modern history, Sagasti teases out individual events, at first glance random and insignificant, and proceeds to masterfully weave them together, entertaining as he educates.
Uncomfortable family situations, unfortunate health conditions, people on the brink of survival - this is what each story in this collection captures, every ripple and every echo that travels from one person to another. Sometimes intimate struggles are as fragile as they are political, and there is nothing but time that keeps us going.
Written in a sometimes irreverent style, in short fragments that at points are more like haikus than narrative prose, this is a truly original reflection on love, relationships, solitude and the aesthetics and purpose of writing.
During the summer of 2014, on one of the stormiest days on record to hit the coast of Uruguay, 31-year old Alejandro, lifeguard and younger brother of our protagonist, dies after being hit by lightning.
In his second novel, Daniel Saldana Paris has created a bone chilling, exact portrait of a hypersensitive childhood that must torture and repeat itself in the mind of the protagonist.
In the terrifying atmosphere of late 1970s Buenos Aires, a young militant couple engaged in the resistance against the military regime adopt a child. Amid the ever-growing oppression, the couple and their baby flee to Brazil, believing it to be a more tranquil country in which to raise a family and pursue their lives.