Imagining Argentina - Lawrence Thornton

"Remarkable . . . deeply
inventive . . . Thorton has imagined Argentina truly; his
inspired fable troubles and feeds our own intriguing imagining."-Los Angeles Times

Imagining Argentina is set in the
dark days of the late 1970's, when thousands of
Argentineans disappeared without a trace into the
general's prison cells and torture
chambers. When
Carlos Ruweda's wife is suddenly taken from him, he
discovers a
magical gift: In waking dreams, he had
clear visions of the fates of "the
disappeared." But he cannot "imagine" what
has happened to his own wife. Driven to near
madness,
his mind cannot be taken away: imagination, stories, and
the mystical secrets of
the human
spirit.

Praise for Imagining Argentina

"A harrowing, brilliant
novel."-The New Yorker

"A
powerful new novel . . . Thorton seems to have wedded
his study of such writers as Borges and Marquez with thy his own instinctive gift for metaphor, and
in doing so, created his own brand of magical realism"-The New York Times

"Imagining Argentina is a slim volume filled with beautiful writing. It is an exciting adventure story. It is a haunting love story. And it is a story for all
time."-Detroit Free Press

"The writing is crystalline, the
metaphors compelling . . . Its central theme is universal."-The Philadelphia Inquirer

"In a time when much North American fiction is contained by crabbed realism, Thorton takes for his material one of the bleaker recent instances of human cruelty, sees in it the enduring nobility of the human spirit and imagines a book that celebrates that spirit."-The Washington Post Book World

"A powerful first
novel and a manifesto for the memorializing power of literature."-The New York Times Book Review

"A
profoundly hopeful book."-The Cleveland Plain Dealer