Southeaster

‘Southeaster is a meandering, estuarine version of a road novel, a watery Hemingway-meets-Camus tale of a loner exposed to the elements and in wordless search for some kind of purpose ... sensuous and meticulously observed ... a luminous and troubling South American classic.’

* Financial Times *

‘Haroldo Conti was one of the great Argentinian writers.’

-- Gabriel García Márquez

‘Haroldo is a river, a delta with many streams that embrace the islands as they pass. His literature is directed at the solitude of others, and it brings a warm embrace, in the same way the river does.’

-- Eduardo Galeano

‘The economy of his writing, impregnated with poetry and tenderness, is remarkable . . . Don’t be fooled by the story’s initial, quasi-bucolic, calm. A dramatic crescendo leads to the final roar.’

-- María Esther de Miguel * La Nación *

‘Haroldo Conti was one of Argentina's finest prose writers at the time he was “disappeared” by the military junta in the mid 1970s. He was fifty-one years old. This first publication of his work in English introduces us not only to one of South America's finest twentieth-century writers but to a world view, a landscape and a unique literary vision that is essential to our time.’

-- John Burnside

‘What a surprise and a treat. I was swept up in the great murky flow of it. Conti is a writer for whom place is character, not backdrop, and what a place, what a character. He’s a revelation.’

-- Tim Winton

'Readers in English can at last immerse themselves in the subtle, beautifully wrought journey of the voyager . . . Southeaster is one of the most original contributions to what Conti himself would term, in an interview in 1974, “a stylistically and imaginatively Argentine literature”.’

-- University of Professor John King (School of Comparative American Studies Warwick)

‘Conti’s work occurs at the point where landscape and human psychology meet and there’s a soulfulness to his writing that I find deeply touching and nourishing. One of the best books published this year.’

-- Foyle's Staff Picks

Southeaster is a meandering, estuarine version of a road novel, a watery Hemingway-meets-Camus tale of a loner exposed to the elements and in wordless search for some kind of purpose . . . sensuous and meticulously observed . . . a luminous and troubling South American classic.’

-- Melissa Harrison * Financial Times *

‘With his plain but indefatigably inventive descriptions, Conti conveys how “the river always changes” . . . In long winding sentences full of alternately subordinating clauses, Conti slackens the narrative to match the river’s pace . . . but Conti also knows how to make time buckle, and the last fifty pages . . . are exhilarating.’

-- Sophie Hughes * Times Literary Supplement *

‘Southeaster is a particularly rich evocation of interiority . . . organising a chaos of memories, observations, thoughts, and feelings into meaningfulness.’

-- Jessica Sequeira * Boston Review *

‘Despite the obvious romance of the delta, of Conti’s strange, distorting setting, this is not a novel which romanticises the lives of those who live in it. It leaves the reader with a savage beauty to contemplate, something contradictory, tense, and ultimately self-destructive in a way that seems to correspond with so much of Argentina’s recent history.’

* 3am Magazine *

‘Conti’s frequent change of tense and the rhythm of his translated prose echo the ever-changing nature of the water itself . . . a beautifully written story.’

* We Love This Book *

‘The description of the waters and their changing moods elevate the river to a character in its own right.’

* Workshy F