Please join us for this Book Club presentation co-sponsored with AFAR Media
featuring our guest
Daniel Loedel
Author of Hades, Argentina
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Thursday | 29 April 2021 | 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. EST
HADES, ARGENTINA, Daniel Loedel’s literary debut, offers readers a protagonist who has left his country at a moment of personal and political upheaval, shedding his identity and fleeing to the safety of the United States. The fates of those left behind — Argentina’s “disappeared” — fuel this elegant, courageous novel.
In 1976, Tomás Oriilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he's moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has always drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of young insurgents fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. As the military begin to disappear more and more people like her, she presents Tomás with a way to prove himself. As always, he'll do anything for Isabel. But what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both?
It will be years before a summons to return home arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York, having spent eight years “officially disappeared.” But his world begins to crack open when he is called back to Argentina for the first time since 1976, the year of his torture and escape.
In his journey traveling back to Buenos Aires for a funeral that yields to a search for his lost love, his homecoming becomes an odyssey into a reexamination of the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he's become and who he once aspired to be.
As Tomás reenters the world of Argentina’s dirty war, time blurs, and the surreal blends with reality. As he relives trauma and torture, readers experience it with him, seeing a slice of history that is rarely talked about and feeling immersed in the ways that love, guilt and regret drive so many decisions.
Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, brilliantly narrated literary debut.
Note: readers who wish to participate can purchase their advance copy of the book here
About Book Club events with AFAR Media
This is our second collaborative book club event co-hosted by UNA-NYC and AFAR Media in a virtual format online. AFAR is the world’s leading travel media brand that inspires and guides travelers to have deeper, richer, and more meaningful experiences. AFAR values a deep sense of cultural immersion and exploration, celebrating places and global diversity in many forms. Since AFAR believes that travel can change the world, why not let books be our literary ambassadors to guide new journeys?
We announce new book selections quarterly for our members and booklovers, and those who want to participate should purchase the book and register for the online discussion circle, when they'll be able to share their experiences — of where the journey took them, who they met along the way, and what new vistas of ideas and life horizons they encountered. Our book selections may be fiction or nonfiction, in translation or originally in English, and from a diverse range of authors who will help you get to know our world from their unique perspectives.
These conversations will take place virtually on Goodreads, and will be led by an AFAR editor in dialogue with the author of our featured books.
DANIEL LOEDEL
Daniel Loedel is a Senior Editor at Bloomsbury. Previously he was an editor at Simon and Schuster for eight years. The authors he has worked with have won or been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize and many other accolades.
Prior to becoming a book editor and moving to Brooklyn, he lived in Buenos Aires. Hades, Argentina, his first novel, was inspired by his half-sister, who was disappeared in Argentina in 1978 by the military dictatorship.