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Land of Smoke
by Sara Gallardo
(Pushkin Press, £12)
TO READ this collection of masterfully crafted short stories by Sara Gallardo, first published in 1977 and now translated for the first time into English by Jessica Sequeira, is to be immersed in a dazzling and at times hallucinatory world.
Gallardo, scion of a patrician family of Spanish origin in Argentina, was a descendant of Bartolome Mitre, President of Argentina from 1862 to 1868, and the name of her grandfather Angel Gallardo, a civil engineer, scientist and politician, now adorns a busy subway station in Buenos Aires.
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