Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The President
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Men of Maize
In the highlands of Guatemala, Gaspar Ilóm leads his Mayan people against the ladino farmers burning the forest to plant maize for profit, and the story spreads into myth.
The Obscene Bird of Night
Humberto Peñaloza, a failed writer turned servant who calls himself Mudito, narrates from a crumbling Santiago house of retreat for old women, retelling his service to an aristocratic family and the deformed heir they hid away on an estate peopled by monsters.
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.
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.
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.
Residence on Earth
The dark, surreal poems Neruda wrote as a young consul in Burma, Ceylon and Java, of loneliness, decay and the weight of things.
Herscht 07769
Florian Herscht, a gentle giant in a small town in Thuringia, writes letter after letter to Angela Merkel warning her of the end of the universe, while the neo-Nazis around him have other plans.