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Pacazo
  • Published: 2 February 2012
  • ISBN: 9781446450062
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 544

Pacazo

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Epic, innovative and tender novel from one of the best kept secrets in American literature.

John Segovia is many things - American, corpulent, shambolic, and obsessed with the history of South America. This history is what drew him to the city of Piura in the coastal desert of Peru, where every grain of sand teems with stories of Incas and conquistadors. Here, where past and present intermesh, he thought he'd finally found a life for himself. He met Pilar and he married her; they had a baby girl. But John is now a widower - and a killer remains at large.

A foreigner in a riotous, mythic city, John must somehow learn to be a father to his infant daughter, to cope with the visceral trauma of loss, and to suppress a voracious desire for impossible revenge. His story features an extraordinary cast of characters (a one-eyed nanny, a collective of monk-like vigilantes, the conquistadors themselves); it travels centuries within sentences, encompasses slapstick and heartbreak, and takes John from bordellos to bat-infested cinemas and ancient burial grounds in his attempts to 'beat back death'.

Alive with risk and innovation, Pacazo is a novel which maximises the freedom of fiction. It gives living form to anger and fear and desire, to courage and kindness, strength and love, and tells a story as richly entertaining as it is moving.
  • Published: 2 February 2012
  • ISBN: 9781446450062
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 544
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About the author

Roy Kesey

Roy Kesey's books include the novel Pacazo, the novella Nothing in the World, the short story collections All Over and Any Deadly Thing, and an historical guide to the Chinese city of Nanjing. He has received an NEA creative writing fellowship, the Paula Anderson Book Award, and the Bullfight Media Little Book Award. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in more than a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and New Sudden Fiction. He currently lives in the United States with his wife and children.
RK

Praise for Pacazo

Pacazo is a beautiful adventure in structure and language, and a brave, honest exploration of extreme and conflicting emotions.

We Love This Book

A wholly immersive reading experience - both heart-rending and complex.

Stuart Evers, Daily Telegraph

Astonishing... [A] virtuoso display of putting your reader comprehensively through the wringer... Utterly convincing.

Metro

Big, intelligent and wonderfully original.

The Times

Mesmerisngly wrought anguish, violence and derangement reminiscent of the best of Robert Stone or Dennis Johnson.

Uncut

Things like this - the relentless march of history, the ongoing agony of grief, can only be captured in something that is long, something that argues persuasively that there is merit in obduracy, something whose rewards are hard-won. At times the rewards of Pacazo may seem particularly hard-won but they are worth it.

David Annand, Sunday Telegraph