Charco Press

Charco Press is an award-winning Edinburgh-based publisher focused on bringing the best Latin American authors to English-speaking readers.

In just four years of publishing, Charco has had two finalists for the prestigious International Booker Prize, and has won Scottish Small Press of the Year at the British Book Awards twice, in 2019 and 2021. Their titles have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, TLS and other major publications in the UK and internationally.

Charco's The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada was the winner of the 2019 EIBF First Book Award, as voted for by the public.

Featured products

Havana Year Zero

£9.99

With Cuba's economic Special Period as a backdrop, Julia sets out on an investigation to befriend two men who could help lead to the document's whereabouts, and must pick apart a tangled mystery of sex, family legacies and the intricacies of how people find ways to survive in a country at its lowest ebb.

Elena Knows

£9.99

In a single day, a journey across Buenos Aires reveals a daughter to her mother, a mother to herself, and the oppressive weight of received ideas to women connected by a fleeting encounter, twenty years before.

The Adventures of China Iron

£9.99

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.

A Musical Offering

£8.99

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?

The Wind That Lays Waste

£9.99

The Wind That Lays Waste begins in the great pause before a storm. Reverend Pearson is evangelizing across the Argentinian countryside with Leni, his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God or fate leads them to the workshop and home of an aging mechanic called Gringo Brauer and a young boy named Tapioca.

Theatre of War

£9.99

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.

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The German Room

£9.99

A female protagonist - a young woman - travels from Argentina to Germany trapped by emotional conflicts. When she arrives, she is constantly exposed to all kinds of adventures and incidents, some funny, others tragic.

The President's Room

£8.99

In a nameless, homogenised suburb, in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It is simply how things are. No one appears to question or contradict this spatial disposition, except one young boy.

Trout, Belly Up

£8.99

The peace and violence of Guatemala is ever-present in the background in these tales. We follow Henrik, a good man struck time and again by misfortune, as he confronts different diatribes posed by the crude realities of farming life. Through his journey we meet merciless businessmen, drug dealers and fallen angels, all wanting a piece of their pie.