The Country of To

(Paperback)

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Description

This sumptuously written thriller asks probing questions about how we live with each other and with our planet.

The Cobra is a hard man in a brutal world. Expelled from El Salvador after a drug bust and working as a Guatemalan businessmans enforcer, he meets and comes to admire Polo, a human rights campaigner who defends the Mayan people. When the Cobras boss orders him to murder Polo, a last-minute stab of conscience brings him into conflict with drug-dealing oligarchs. Now a marked man, hes offered a chance to escape to a remote Mayan community facing down its own assassin: the encroaching mining companies who want the land regardless of their impact on the planet. Can the Cobra change his solipsistic ways and learn to defend a culture caught in the crosshairs of another kind of battleBy the writer Roberto Bolao has called the most rigorous of his generation, Rodrigo Rey Rosa'sThe Country of To is gripping thriller about power and redemption.

Reviews

Praise for Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Intense By the end of this novel you feel glad to have come out on the other side and carry the hope that Rodrigo Rey Rosa, those close to him, and his fellow countrymen will do so, too.
New York Journal of Books

Rodrigo Rey Rosa creates stories of mythic proportions.
San Francisco Chronicle

[Human Matter's] exploration of the history of violence and secrecy in Central America has obvious relevance to today's politics, but the tale of a writer trying to understand the truth behind the things he's seeing gives the novel a resounding, universal echo.
Vanity Fair

Rey Rosa, a Guatemalan writer often compared to Roberto Bolano was inspired to write a meta-novel about his experiences [visiting Guatemala's National Police archive] and the stories he uncovered. The result reads like the journal of a heartbroken researcher who stumbles on the darkest truths about his native country.
Chicago Tribune

Wonderful The tension between the fundamental pleasure of the novelwhich comes from trying to piece together meaning out of the disparate information available to us and the narrators insistence that its futilecreates a weirdly gratifying reading experience.
Chicago Review of Books

To read him is to learn how to write and is also an invitation to the pure pleasure of allowing oneself to be borne along by sinister or fantastic stories ... To say that Rey Rosa is the most rigorous writer of my generation, and at the same time the clearest, the one who weaves his stories together best, the most brilliant of them all, is not to say anything new.
Roberto Bolao

Author Bio

Born and raised in Guatemala City, Rodrigo Rey Rosa is the author of five collections of short stories and more than a dozen novels that have been published in sixteen languages. Among his works available in English are The Beggars Knife, The Pelcari Project (both translated by expatriate American author Paul Bowles), The Good Cripple, The African Shore, Human Matter, and Chaos: A Fable. Rey Rosa has been awarded Guatemalas national literature prize, Chinas Best Foreign Book Award, and, for his lifes work, the prestigious Jos Donoso Prize in Chile.

Stephen Henighans translations have twice been longlist finalists for the Best Translated Book Award and once for the International Dublin Literary Award. Henighan is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the short story collection Blue River and Red Earth (2018) and the novel The World of After (2021).