A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love.
In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both?
It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him, however, so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.
Out now from Riverhead Books
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“An astonishingly powerful novel about the complex nature of guilt. It sets the personal against the political with real emotional accuracy and sharp narrative skill.”
— Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster
“Deception, violence, a society on the brink, Hades, Argentina haunted me long after I turned the final page. Loedel is a writer of enormous talent.”
— Elliot Ackerman, author of Red Dress in Black and White
“A remarkable novel, as imaginatively bold as it is morally complex. It will stay with me for a very long time.”
— Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire
“Hades, Argentina brilliantly explores the fault lines between heroism and complicity, guilt and trauma, and love and betrayal. Daniel Loedel has written a haunting and beautiful novel.”
— Phil Klay, author of Redeployment
“A stunning descent into the haze of memory and history. In his interrogation of complicity and violence, Loedel explores how institutionalized evil disappears humans not only from the physical world, but from their own souls as well.”
— Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes A River
“A remarkable novel, personal and political, elegiac and intimate, with a tenderness and wisdom evident in every passage. A beautiful book.”
— Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names
“Strange, gorgeous, and terrifying—a book for the grievers, and for those of us who wish we could turn back time to remedy past mistakes—and so, for all of us.”
— R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
“Loedel writes in the venerable Argentinian tradition of mixing the political and the supernatural, but his novel comes from a different language and a new sensibility. It took me to places I had never visited before.”
— Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling