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Lightning strikes painful familial chords in Uruguay

Older Brother
by Daniel Mella
(Charco Press, £12.99)

EARLY on a February morning in 2014, during a violent summer storm at a beach near Piriapolis in Uruguay, lightning strikes the lifeguard tower where Alejandro is sleeping. It kills the 31-year-old musician and surfer and injures his girlfriend Ana Laura.

What happens next is the focus of this work, part-fiction, part-autobiography, by Uruguayan novelist Daniel Mella, who is Alejandro’s older brother.

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