Translation Rights TQE / The Armies

Ismael, an old retired teacher, and his wife, Otilia, have lived idly and very modestly for the last forty years in the town of San José. Otilia must reprimand him once in a while because Ismael has the habit of spying on his neighbour, Geraldina, a sensual Brazilian woman who walks around her luminous garden in the nude.

The atmosphere becomes strange as the neighbors’ desperation and fear deepen due to the kidnappings and disappearances of their family members, and these events seem to foreshadow even more terrible circumstances to come.

As the violence increases, Ismael learns that someone has kidnapped the husband and the son of the Brazilian woman. He is also told that his wife, Otilia, has been looking for him, but he cannot find her anywhere.

The attacks continue and events seem to take place at a much faster pace as the violence gets out of hand. Gradually, the survivors flee the town before it is too late, but Ismael decides to stay behind. His decision will lead him to a dark and unpredictable future.

Los ejércitos was awarded the Tusquets Editores Prize for Novel 2006, announced on November 29, 2006 in the Guadalajara Book Fair. The jury – made up by Alberto Manguel as Chairman, Almudena Grandes, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Beatriz de Moura (in representation of Tusquets Editores), and Aurelio Major as secretary – valued the merits of a novel that boldly takes on the thorny subject of the systematic violence that is imposed upon a community, and does so with masterful and dramatic elegance.

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”.