The Dancer And The Thief: A Novel - Tapa dura

With prisons overflowing in Chile, the president declares a general amnesty for all nonviolent criminals. Angel Santiago, a youth determined to avenge abuse he received in jail, seeks out the notorious bank robber Nicolas Vergara Grey, whose front-page exploits won him a reputation he would rather leave behind. Their plan for an ambitious and daring robbery is complicated by the galvanizing presence of Victoria Ponce, a virtuosic dancer and high-school dropout whose father was a victim of the regime. Praised for his "ability to place a personal story in the context of a national upheaval and make it warm, funny and universal" (San Francisco Chronicle), Antonio Skarmeta sets this exuberant love story against the backdrop of the new Chile, free from the Pinochet dictatorship but beholden to the perils of globalization. The Dancer and the Thief, which won Spain's prestigious Planeta Prize, is a remarkable new novel from one of South America's finest storytellers.

Antonio Skarmeta achieved worldwide renown with The Postman (Il Postino). His fiction has since received dozens of awards and has been translated into nearly thirty languages worldwide. He lives in Santiago, Chile. KATHERINE SILVER is an award-winning liter- ary translator and the codirector of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC). Her translations include works by Ce'sar Aira, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Jose' Emilio Pacheco, Elena Poniatowska, Jorge Franco, and Marti'n Ada'n, among others.