Books like Distant Star
A narrator looks back on a charismatic young poet in 1970s Chile who, after the coup, reappears as an air force pilot skywriting verses and is linked to the disappearance of women.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Distant Star
By Night in Chile
A priest reviews his life under Pinochet's regime in a single feverish night, and the monologue reveals the complicity of Chilean intellectuals with fascism.
Amulet
Hiding in a university bathroom when the army storms the campus in 1968, an Uruguayan poet in Mexico City remembers the young poets she mothered and begins to see their futures.
The President
In a Central American capital ruled by a nameless dictator, the murder of an army officer sets off a wave of persecution that reaches the president's own favourite.
The House of the Spirits
Four generations of the Trueba family across a thinly-veiled twentieth-century Chile, from a telepathic grandmother to the military coup that takes her granddaughter into a basement.
In Evil Hour
In a small Colombian town under a military mayor, anonymous lampoons start appearing on doors overnight, exposing the residents' secrets, and one of them leads to a killing.
The Autumn of the Patriarch
A decaying Caribbean dictator whose reign has lasted over a century recalls his lovers, his enemies, and the loneliness of absolute power.
Conversation in the Cathedral
Santiago Zavala, a journalist, runs into his father's old chauffeur Ambrosio in Lima, and over four hours in a bar called La Catedral they go back over the Odría dictatorship and what it did to them both.
The Feast of the Goat
Urania Cabral returns to the Dominican Republic decades after fleeing it, and her story braids with Trujillo's final day and the conspirators who ambushed his car in 1961.
Simpatía
A film writer in a collapsing Caracas inherits his father-in-law’s mansion on the condition that he turn it into a shelter for the dogs the exiled middle class has left behind.
The Land of Green Plums
In Ceaușescu's Romania, a young woman from the German-speaking minority and three young men from the provinces are drawn together after a girl in her dormitory is found hanged, and come under the eye of the secret police.
Shame
In a country that is and is not Pakistan, two feuding politicians' families are bound by marriage to a girl whose blushes of shame turn into violence.
When We Cease to Understand the World
Linked narratives enter the interior lives of 20th-century scientists and mathematicians at the edge of what knowledge can bear.