The Ministry of Special Cases

Description

Buenos Aires, 1970s. Kaddish Poznan chips the names off gravestones for a living, removing traces of disreputable ancestors for their more respectable kin. His wife Lillian works in insurance, earning money when people live longer than they fear. When the government is overthrown in a military coup, their son Pato is arrested by the police and becomes one of the disappeared. Desperate to find him, Kaddish and Lillian turn to the Ministry of Special Cases, a bureaucracy of anguish and false promises, and they discover just how far they are willing to go to save their son...

Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an international best seller, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the nov els The Ministry of Special Cases and Dinner at the Center of the Earth. His books have been translated into twenty-two languages. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Let ters, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.

Powerful and engaging ... shot through with a dark humour, which makes it all the more moving * The Times * Who is this Nathan Englander, so young in novelist years, but already possessed of an old masters voice? One reads this novel in awe of Englander's talent * New York Times * Wry and haunting ... Englander's novel is a striking memorial to the victims of political oppression * Sunday Times * Englander writes with exquisite precision * Guardian * At times so heartbreaking that you want to turn away * Sunday Telegraph *