Translation Rights TQE / LANÚS

Before the police can find him, Francisco, who has travelled from Lanús to the heart of Buenos Aires with 1,000 stolen pesos to pay for his girlfriend’s abortion, has made a call for help to an old friend who resides in the capital. That friend is Adrian, an ex-player of the Racing junior team, who currently works as a designer. But Adrian hears the message when it is too late and only the memory of an old pact will push him to return to the old Lanús neighbourhood, to try to solve Francisco’s disappearance. He will find the old friends that made up the group that long fell apart and, with them, will remember the old soccer games, the fights between different bands, or the afternoons when they sat around waiting for the arrival of the Martians. Nowadays, however, he will discover clandestine businesses, stories of violence and threats in a neighbourhood dominated by the local mafia. Adrian will take the risk of shedding light on some murky matters, while he tries to work some sense into his love life, which includes an ex-girlfriend, a hysterical secretary, a prostitute friend of his, and an enigmatic girl from the neighbourhood whom he has just met.

Lanús is a novel about the suburbs and about initiation under the façade of a passionate detective story. It is an agile story, with many turns of the screw about faithfulness and betrayal, reunions and new loves, in just the right doses of the best type of humor.

“Somewhere between a crime fiction novel and a Bildungsroman, Lanús gives us something that must necessarily take place in all good novels: an absorbing story, with a strong framework, and credible characters that face possible conflicts.”

Süddeutsche Zeitung

“Its fluid prose traps the reader from the beginning and forces him to read the novel in one sitting.”

La Voz del Interior

Sergio Olguín was born in Buenos Aires in 1967 and studied Arts in the city’s university. He has been working as a journalist since 1984. He founded and directed for several years the cultural magazine V de Vian. He was the co-founder and first director of the cinema magazine El Amante. His articles have been published in newspapers such as Página/12, La Nación, and El País of Montevideo, and he is currently editor of the magazine Lamujerdemivida. He has been the editor of the anthologies Los mejores cuentos argentinos (The Best Argentinean Short Sories, 1999), La selección argentina (The Argentinean Team, 2000), Cross a la mandíbula (Cross to the Jaw, 2000), Perón vuelve. Cuentos sobre el peronismo (Perón Returns. Short Stories about Peronism, 2000), and Escritos con sangre. Cuentos argentinos sobre casos policiales (Written in Blood. Argentinean Short Stories about Police Cases, 2003). In 1998 he published the book of short stories, Las griegas (Greek Women – Vian Ediciones) and in 2002 his first novel, Lanús. Since then, he has published the novel Filo (2003), and the juvenile novels El equipo de los sueños (The Dream Team, 2004), which has been translated into German, French and Italian, and Springfield (2007). Since 2006 he directs the collection of chronicles Andanzas Crónicas in Tusquets Editores Argentina.