From one of the most accomplished writers to emerge from Latin America, No Place for Heroes is a darkly comic novel about a mother and son who return to Buenos Aires in search of her former lover, whom she met during Argentina’s Dirty War.
During Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the late ’70s and early ’80s, Lorenza and Ramon, two passionate militants opposing Videla’s dictatorship, met and fell in love. Now, Lorenza and her son, Mateo, have come to Buenos Aires to find Ramon, Mateo’s father. Holed up in the same hotel room, mother and son share a common goal, yet are worlds apart on how they perceive it. For Lorenza, who came of age in the political ferment of the ’60s, it is intertwined with her past ideological and emotional anchors (or were they illusions?), while her postmodernist son, a child of the ’90s who couldn’t care less about politics or ideology, is looking for his actual father—not the idea of a father, but the Ramon of flesh and blood.
Anything goes as this volatile pair battle it out: hilarious misunderstandings, unsettling cruelty, and even a temptation to murder. In the end, they begin to come to a more truthful understanding of each other and their human condition.
No Place for Heroes is an addition to that long tradition of the eternal odd couple—in works ranging from Waiting for Godot to Kiss of the Spider Woman—waiting for their fortunes to change, written by one of the most talented and internationally celebrated authors at work today.
From the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

From Restrepo (Delirium) comes a surprisingly plain-faced novel of parenthood set in the aftermath of the Argentine Dirty War. A journalist and one-time revolutionary, Lorenza is returning to Buenos Aires in the late 1990s with her teenage son, Mateo. Both are looking for RamoÌün Iribarren, a shadowy resistance leader and Mateo's father, with whom Lorenza spent the years of General Videla's junta distributing underground newspapers and frequenting apartment safe houses with toothpaste tubes filled with microfilm. As their search takes them deep into Argentina's recent past, Lorenza fills her impressionable son's head with tales of his troubled nativity, but Mateo has been brought up a member of a generation that may ultimately be beyond Lorenza's understanding. Restrepo is surefooted when it comes to depicting life during wartime, but the authenticity of that world is so starkly juxtaposed with her fumbling grasp of Mateo and youth culture that readers may wish that Restrepo had set the novel in the fascinating times that the characters seem largely content to relive.
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Review

"Luminous and delightful"—San Francisco Chronicle
Praise for Laura Restrepo’s *Delirium

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“Stunning, dense, complex, mind-blowing . . . This novel goes far above politics, right up into high art.” —Washington Post Book World
“One of the finest novels written in recent memory.” —José Saramago
“Masterful . . . Literary dynamite.” —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“Every word in Delirium is perfectly chosen, painfully honest and brutally effective. Restrepo chooses her words like a poet, with infinite care.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“A disconcertingly lovely book, and its depiction of Colombian society at an awful moment in its history is sharp, vivid, utterly persuasive.” —New York Times Book Review
From the Hardcover edition.

Once a month, the refinery workers of the Tropical Oil Company descend upon Tora, a city in the Colombian forest. They journey down from the mountains searching for earthly bliss and hoping to encounter Sayonara, the legendary Indian prostitute who rules their squalid paradise like a queen. Beautiful, exotic, and mysterious, Sayonara, the undisputed barrio angel, captivates whoever crosses her path. Then, one day, she violates the unwritten rules of her profession and falls in love with a man she can never have. Sayonara's unrequited passion has tragic consequences not only for her, but for all those whose lives ultimately depend on the Tropical Oil Company.
A slyly humorous yet poignant love story, The Dark Bride lovingly recreates the lusty, heartrending world of Colombian prostitutes and the men of the oil fields who are entranced by them. Full of wit and intelligence, tragedy and compassion, The Dark Bride is luminous and unforgettable.

"How can I tell him that he will never find her, after he has been searching for her all his life? If I could talk to him without breaking his heart, there is something I would tell him, in hopes it would stop his sleepless nights and wrongheaded search for a shadow. I would repeat this to him: 'Your Matilde Lina is in limbo, the dwelling place of those who are neither dead nor alive.' But that would be like severing the roots of the tree that supports him. Besides, why do it if he is not going to believe me."In the midst of war, the protagonists of A Tale of the Dispossessed are continuously searching: for a promised land, a destiny, the face of a woman who has disappeared -- searching for an impossible love and, conversely, for a love that is possible.A way station for refugees from violence is the setting for an intense love triangle in which an uprooted and wandering people lead the reader to experience the collective drama of forced relocation. A Tale of the Dispossessed speaks to us about the inexorable law that has led man, expelled from paradise since the days of Adam through to modern times, in his search for a way back home.

From Publishers Weekly

This slim volume offers Spanish and English versions of a novella about an encounter between strangers amid political chaos. Set in Tora, Colombia (where Restrepo's The Dark Bride was set), during a war, the work has a timeless, open quality that could situate it almost anywhere in time and place. Readers learn, through the perspective of a nameless narrator who works at a convent sheltering "the displaced," about the mysterious man Three Sevens, a new arrival at the refuge. Three Sevens is desperate to locate Matilde Lina, the laundress who rescued and raised him, from whom he was forcibly separated as a teenager during the Little War. The narrator, offering him room and board, falls in love with him, but must compete with his Oedipal attachment to Matilde Lina ("The world tastes of her," he says). Thus begins a spare but symbolic love story, a modern-day fairy tale with Freudian trimmings. Restrepo, a journalist, activist and academic, employs a singular, accessible voice that melds her political sensibilities with hints of magical realism. The author has been lauded by Gabriel García Márquez, and this book will fit snugly into the canon of modern Latin American literature. Even as it describes violence and fear, it shimmers with an almost innocent charm and a quiet lyricism.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Laura Restrepo is the bestselling author of six novels, including The Dark Bride, A Tale of the Dispossessed, and Delirio, which received Spain's prestigious Alfaguara Prize. She lives in Colombia.

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Laura Restrepo fue profesora de literatura en la Universidad de Colombia, editora política en la revista Semana y miembro de la Comisión Nacional para la Paz. Ha escrito destacadas novelas tales como Leopardo al sol; Dulce Compañía, que obtuvo el premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en México y el premio France Culture en Francia; y Delirio, que obtuvo el premio Alfaguara. Actualmente vive en Bogotá, Colombia.