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That’s Gonzalo C. Garcia looking at the first copies of his wonderful new novel Telenovela - and let me tell you, we felt very proud and happy to be able to show them to him. This book has been years in the making - a labour of love and much more. A difficult story that has to be told - and told right now. It’s about complicity with authoritarianism - and I’m sure you can see why that has such pressing contemporary relevance. But it also offers real hope. It’s also a book set during the final days of Pinochet’s murderous regime in Chile; which is a very useful reminder that all bad things also come to an end. It’s a book that tells us that we’ll get through this. More than that, Telenovela is also a fine work of art. It’s humane and personal, as well as political. It’s real in all kinds of uncomfortable ways - but that also means that it is full of love and joy. I’ll save review coverage until Telenovela is officially release at the end of November (not least because we are still nervously awaiting those reviews!) - but here’s what the wonderful Maureen Freely has just told us about the book: “I laughed, and I cried, but most of all, I held my breath, mesmerised by this author who never puts a foot wrong, even as he walks a tightrope between the quotidian and the surreal, the tragic and the absurd, the hunger games of politics and the dreams that kill us first.” AL Kennedy has also called it: A strangely hopeful and deeply beautiful novel, steeped in an understanding of why a population would largely accept a fascist unreality over creativity and life. It’s special.
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