Good Offices - Hardcover

Evelio Rosero is the author of seven novels and two collections of short stories, as well as of books for children. In Colombia his work has been recognized by the National Literature Award. The Armies (MacLehose Press, 2008) won the 2006 Tusquets International Novel Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2009. Anne McLean has translated the novels of Javier Cercas, Julio Cortazar and Tomas Eloy Martinez, among others. She has twice won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, for Cercas' Soldiers of Salamis and Evelio Rosero's The Armies, and won the Premio Valle Inclan for Soldiers of Salamis. This is her first collaboration with Anna Milsom.

'The book takes place over a long night - not of the soul but of carnival. Characters inhabit a medieval world, sealed from modernity within church and presbytery. This is less a satire on Colombian politics than on the Universal Church. The present Pope Benedict would, one suspect, easily recognise the fusty narrowness alternating with libidinous excess that marks such an unhealthy introversion. It also works as a parable of Colombia. With its waste of grandeur in a sea of bloody tragedy, this is a theme already richly explored in Rosero's earlier novel, The Armies. Like The Armies, winner of the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Good Offices has the atmosphere of a stage set on which the characters fulfil the established roles of a Commedia dell' Arte. Despite the air of sacrilege and saturnalia, none is seriously bad, just all-too-human' Amanda Hopkinson, The Independent. 'Good Offices compels with its gothic atmospherics. The stringent satire, with nods to Victor Hugo, never eclipses the fragile dilemmas of the put-upon acolyte, while the novel hints at a wider web of sinister power and patronage that entails cocaine, corruption and, above all, fear. The translation is sublime. Moving from offbeat humour to soaring spiritual ecstasy, it has both pathos and punch' Guardian . 'Though a slim volume at 140 pages, Evelio Rosero's Good Offices provides layers of intrigue in his simple, yet far from plain, prose ... Rosero's stories are often studies on human nature, his observations tinged with quiet despair ... Rosero's main strength lies in evoking the emotional hunger of his characters through deft twists in plot and appropriately placed allegories. Despite their jarring actions, they are the key ingredient in this tale and linger long after the last page has been turned' The National. 'With a skilfully created, idiosyncratic narrator in Tancredo, and peopled with carnivalesque characters, Good Offices is a beautifully poetic, compact and vivid satire on the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church' Artswarp.