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The 2011 Award

 

Pineiro

Thursday Night Widows

by Claudia Piñeiro

Translated from the original Spanish by Miranda France

 

 

 

Nominated by:

  • Biblioteca Demonstrativa de Brasília BDB, Brazil.
  • Biblioteca Municipal Central de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

 

Publisher of Nominated Edition:

Bitter Lemon Press, UK.

 

the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors
ABOUT THE BOOK

Three bodies lie at the bottom of a swimming pool in a gated country estate near Buenos Aires. It's Thursday night at the magnificent Scaglia house. Behind the locked gates, shielded from the crime, poverty and filth of the people on the streets, the Scaglias and their friends hide lives of infidelity, alcoholism, and abusive marriage. Claudia Piñeiro’s novel eerily foreshadowed a criminal case that generated a scandal in the Argentine media. But this is more than a story about crime. The suspense is a by-product of Piñeiro's hand at crafting a psychological portrait of a professional class that lives beyond its means and leads secret lives of deadly stress and despair. It takes place during the post 9/11 economic melt-down in Argentina but it’s a universal story that will resonate among credit-crunched readers of today.  
Production is expected in 2009 of the film of Thursday Night Widows, by Argentine new wave and award winning director Marcelo Piñeyro.
 

(From Publisher).

 

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Claudia Piñeiro was a journalist, playwright and television scriptwriter and in 1992 won the prestigious Pléyade journalism award. She has more recently turned to fiction and is the author of literary crime novels that are all bestsellers in Latin America and have been translated into four languages. Thursday Night Widows won the Clarin Prize for fiction and is her first title to be available in English

LIBRARIANS' COMMENTS

This is a well built story, powerfully written with a fine irony and subtle humour in a very elegant prose, about a particular community, depicting its everyday life. Pineiro's writing may sometimes make us feel uncomfortable, but her characters are so profoundly built and their lives so intertwined, that at every twist of the story one has to face the challenges of reading it. Doing so is to allow oneself the pleasure to discover a gifted author, something that José Saramago and Rose Montero already knew.

The author writes an ironic novel, uses short and witty sentences to draw a social picture of high middle class society in Argentina of recent years. He describes a class, with an empty way of living, a funny way of viewing reality, because it is limited to their own lives.

 

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