Patagonia Route 203

Keep straight on that way, turn left on Thursday and at night turn left again, and sooner or later you'll reach the sea ...

Parker is an enigmatic trucker who spends his days driving on the infinite, mythical roads of Patagonia, an empty yet wildly beautiful landscape where people are brought together and separated by a shifting, omnipresent wind. Patagonia is a land populated by legends, adventures, and exotic characters, among them a journalist still hunting for Nazi submarines, cannibalistic Trinitarians who have given up eating meat, and a pair of evangelical Bolivian twins who resolutely guard a ghost train.

Happiest behind the wheel, or playing his saxophone, Parker crosses these plains to escape a past he left behind long ago. Finally he finds a sense of direction when he meets Mayten, a strong and beautiful woman who works at a travelling fair. They are separated by an ill fate, but how will he find her in a land where directions change like the wind?

Eduardo Fernando Varela creates and reinvents, out of an inhospitable terrain where nothing grows, an oceanic and extraordinary landscape. Patagonia Route 203 is an ode to liberty, to movement and to the beauty of creation.

''A debut novel crafted like a Coen Brothers movie. A unique world is created that is as wild as it is devilishly human'' - Le Monde

''A strange and hypnotic novel, filled with melancholic humour, that invites you to go on the road. Eduardo Varela drives us far away to listen to the poetry of the world'' - Humanite

Eduardo Fernando Varela lives in Buenos Aires, where he writes scripts for cinema and television, and in Venice. Patagonia Route 203, winner of the Premio Casa de las Americas, is his first novel.

Peter Bush is the award-winning translator of Spanish and Catalan authors, among them Joan Sales, Josep Pla, Juan Goytisolo, Merce Rodoreda and Leonardo Padura.

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