Books by country North America
Six books by writers from El Salvador, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with One Day of Life and Tyrant Memory.
Roque Dalton, the Salvadoran poet killed in 1975, wrote Miguel Mármol, the life story of a communist who survived the 1932 massacre. The book belongs to the testimonial tradition, which sets real lives down in the speaker's own voice. The civil war of 1980 to 1992 shaped much of what followed, with land, military rule and the fate of the poor as recurring subjects.
Manlio Argueta's One Day of Life shows a peasant woman's single day in a rural village on the eve of the war, with death squads and liberation theology close at hand. Horacio Castellanos Moya turns to the city: Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador is an exile's biting monologue against the capital's politics and corruption, and Tyrant Memory is set in 1944, as dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez falls.
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A peasant woman's single day in a rural village on the eve of civil war shows death squads, poverty and liberation theology.
A well-off family lives through the fall of dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in 1944 San Salvador.
A dark, tense noir of postwar San Salvador, showing the fear, gossip and class divisions of the elite.
An exile returns to San Salvador and rants against the city's politics, corruption and culture in a biting monologue.
Spans decades of rural Salvadoran history through a peasant family's struggles against landowners and military repression.
A testimonial life story of a Salvadoran communist who survived the 1932 massacre, tracing labour organising and political violence.
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