Drawing on the legacy of Argentina's Dirty War, Carlos Gamerro's An Open Secret is a compelling postmodern thriller confronting guilt, complicity and the treachery of language itself.

Dario Ezcurra is one of the thousands of Argentinians unlucky enough to be 'disappeared' by the military government-murdered by the local chief of police with the complicity of his friends and neighbours. Twenty years later, Fefe, a child at the time of the murder, returns to the town where Dario met his fate and attempts to discover how the community let such a crime happen. Lies, excuses and evasion ensue — desperate attempts to deny the guilty secret of which the whole community, even Fefe himself, is afraid.

1975. The cusp of Argentina's Dirty War. The magnate Tamerlán has been kidnapped by guerrillas, demanding a bust of Eva Perón be placed in all ninety-two offices of his company. The man for the job: Marroné. His mission: to penetrate the ultimate Argentinian mystery — Eva Perón, the legendary Evita.

Carlos Gamerro's novel is a caustic and original take on Argentina's history.

Buenos Aires, 1992. Hacker Felipe Félix is summoned to the vertiginous twin towers of magnate Fausto Tamerlán and charged with finding the witnesses to a very public crime. Rejecting the mission is not an option. After a decade spent immersed in drugs and virtual realities, trying to forget the freezing trench in which he passed the Falklands War, Félix is forced to confront the city around him — and realises to his shock that the war never really ended.

A detective novel, a cyber-thriller, an inner-city road trip and a war memoir, The Islands is a hilarious, devastating and dizzyingly surreal account of a history that remains all too raw.