Atusparia (A Novel)

A brilliant and transgressive Peruvian novelist recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize offers up her cracked-mirror version of the great Russian novel

A madcap, disobedient, and brilliant novel about the power struggles and passionate upheavals that have long riven liberation movements, Atusparia follows the turbulent life of a fierce left-wing politician from her upbringing in an indigenous, Soviet-sponsored school in 1980s Peru to a high-security prison in the heart of the Amazon jungle, to her eventual presidential candidacy.

The protagonist calls herself Atusparia to honor both her hero, a nineteenth-century revolutionary, and the school of the same name that she attended in the waning days of the Cold War. When the school finds itself in crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union, Atusparia is engulfed in a spiral of drug use and frenzied sexual encounters that lead her astray from the ideals that formed her. Years later, inspired anew by the radical hero of her youth, she embarks on a journey to the edge of Lake Titicaca in southern Peru to try to spark a feminist peasant revolution.

Satiric, autofictional, and relentlessly clear-eyed, Gabriela Wiener’s most ambitious book yet blends social realism with lyric fantasy to reveal how power struggles often get in the way of the passionate desire to change the world. Atusparia is a stylish and incisive novel that is sure to delight, inspire, and provoke.