School

Three bodies lie at the bottom of a swimming pool in a gated country estate near Buenos Aires. Under the gaze of fifteen security guards, the pampered residents of Cascade Heights lead a charmed life of parties and tennis tournaments, ignoring the poverty outside the perimeter wall. Claudia Piñeiro's novel eerily foreshadowed a criminal case that generated a scandal in the Argentine media. But this is more than a tale about crime, it is a psychological portrait of a middle class living beyond its means and struggling to conceal deadly secrets. Set durring the post-9/11 economic melt-down in Argentina, this story will resonate among credit-crunched readers of today.

A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place twenty-seven years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister. Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to try and stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society—not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.

La vida de Lucas, cercado por su tendencia a la introversión y hundido en la pasividad, cambia abruptamente cuando llama a su puerta Sofía, una chica de catorce años que acaba de perder a su madre y que es la hija que, sin saberlo, ha engendrado con una mujer de la que se enamoró en su juventud y nunca volvió a ver. Con vaivenes, marchas y contramarchas, se va tejiendo poco a poco la confianza y se develan los secretos escondidos en las historias de Lucas y Sofía. Juntos encontrarán el tesoro de las afinidades y la complicidad que, sanando las heridas del desamor y la vergüenza, les permitirá dejar atrás el pasado. Esta novela es la historia de dos seres solitarios y heridos que descubren nuevas formas de amor y enfrentan con miedos y vacilaciones, pero también con la alegría de dar y recibir, el cambio más grande de sus vidas.