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Letters from Latin America: September 23, 2019
Fiction and poetry from Giusseppe Caputo, Juan Villoro, Carlos Andres Gomez and Mario Montalbetti
Exceptional debut: Giuseppe Caputo

THERE are books that stay with you long after you put them down and one of them is An Orphan World (Charco Press, £9.99), the debut novel from Colombian writer Giuseppe Caputo. Rich in images, registers and nuances, it's a book you can almost read as a long, lyrical poem.

In it, a father and his son attempt to survive poverty by moving into a poorer neighbourhood near the sea, possibly somewhere in Latin America.

Sometimes they find strange improbable things on the desolate beach — broken clocks, used pans, a derelict sofa. And, as they devise hilarious plans to get by, buy food or pay rent, violence in all its forms will confront them wherever they are.  

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