Translation Rights TQE / The Luncheons

By the winner of the II Tusquets Editores Prize for Novel and the 2009 Foreign Fiction Prize with LOS EJÉRCITOS (THE ARMIES)

An apparently quiet and respectable church in Bogota dedicates itself to feeding the needy. Hunchback Tancredo is in charge of supervising the lunches served daily, each day devoted to a different group of underprivileged. But, for once, everything is shaken up in the church. A small change in routine, the brief departure of supposedly impeccable Father Almida and the arrival of another priest –a bit irreverent and drinker- will bring chaos and uncover how much oppression, secret desires and dark faces are hidden by the members of the small community: hunchback Tancredo, greedy Father Almida, the dark sacristan Machado, his lustful goddaughter Sabina and the three Lilias, three old women who take care of the domestic services of the parish.

In Evelio Rosero’s books, life is a slow walk full of small gestures, like the mist of a dream. He traps the reader in an environment where the limits between fantasy and reality, dreams and real life begin to disappear.

Praise for previous novel Los ejércitos:

“This is an important and powerful book.” The Times

“Written in a compressed, lean style, which addresses the difficulty of the material with uncompromising clarity”. Times Literary Supplement

“ Not only does he treat a real problem – denounced both from inside and outside of literature – with renewed freshness, but he also manages to bring his characters to a level of humanity that shares a lot with Philip Roth’s bodily decadence and with the moral abysses of J.M. Coetzee.”  El Periódico

“Rosero is capable of creating a world of senses that gives light to the darkness enveloping his characters. One of the main achievements of this writer is introducing the reader into fiction by playing with his senses. He confesses his preoccupation “with sound and beauty, with finding poetry in each and every one of my sentences, even if they narrate downright atrocities.” Abc

Evelio Rosero was born in Bogota in 1958. He studied Social Communication at the Externado University in Colombia. He is the author of the trilogy “Primera Vez” (“First Time”) made up of the novels Mateo solo (Mateo Alone, 1984), Juliana los mira (Juliana Looks On, 1986) and El incendiado (The Burning Man, 1988, II Pedro Gómez Valderrama Prize to the best Colombian novel published between 1988 and 1992). His later novels, Señor que no conoce la luna (The Man Who Did Not Know the Moon, 1992), Las muertes de fiesta (The Deaths of Feasting, 1995), En el lejero (In the Distance, 2003), and Los almuerzos, which we now make available in Spain, as well as his books of short stories Las esquinas más largas (The Longest Corners, 1998) and Cuento para matar un perro y otros cuentos (To Kill a Dog and Other Stories, 1989) have been the subject of study and of theses. In 2006 he was awarded the National Prize for Literature in Colombia, but it was in 2007 with his novel Los ejércitos (The Armies), winner of the II Tusquets Editores Prize for Novel, that he became internationally known. The novel has been translated into seven different languages and has received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom. About the book, the jury claimed, “It is a novel of love, war and pain written with utmost beauty”.