Why a Booktrail?
2000s: A story about survival and one woman’s struggle moving to the big city and caring for her son. Shows the less glamourous side to the city.
Paradises
What you need to know before your trail
Although a sequel to the author’s first book Open Door, this is not really a sequel in the strict sense that it does still read as a standalone and nothing is lost from not having read it. A woman is forced to leave her home – her husbands farm – following his death and so she moves to the city of Buenos Aires with her four year old son. She finds work and accommodation in the city but this is where her real struggle begins.
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
Set mainly in modern day Buenos Aires, the landscape of this novel is made up of flooded streets, crowded bars, cheap motels with communal living. Any city can evoke feelings of feeling alone and anonymous people walking around with no sense of connecting with anyone.
There are places here where people connect – the squat for one where the mother and child go to live. It was named El Buti after a man who died there whilst resisting eviction. There’s her place of work – the reptile house in the zoo and then the underground shelter of the posh house.
Paradises is not an apt name for any of these places and in fact the title comes from the paradise trees which lines the streets of the city – but whose beads of toxic fruit spread harm through the city.
Paradise and despair come from the same tree it would seem. How apt.
Where Next?
