This is a book (published in 1961 when Bastos was exiled from his native Paraguay) about sin, suffering, and the inhumanity of man to himself and to others.

Latin America has seen, time and again, the rise of dictators, Supreme Leaders possessed of the dream of absolute power, who sought to impose their mad visions of Perfect Order on their own peoples. Latin American writers, in turn, have responded with fictional portraits of such figures, and no novel of this genre is as universally esteemed as Augusto Roa Bastos' I the Supreme, a book that draws on and reimagines the career of the man who was "elected" Supreme Dictator for Life in Paraguay in 1814. By turns grotesque, comic, and strangely moving, I the Supreme is a profound meditation on the uses and abuses of power—over men, over events, over language itself. "An elaborate and erudite opus saturated in the verbal bravura of classic modernism."—The New Yorker

The Prosecutor is the third novel of a trilogy written by the internationally famous Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos. It was preceded by the novels Son of Man and I The Supreme. Together these three works contemplate what the author has termed "the monotheism of power." The Prosecutor explores the atrocities of the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay, which lasted from 1954 to 1989. Through connections with important Paraguayan historical figures, such as Francisco Solano López, the novel links the protagonist to Paraguay's past as he struggles to give meaning to his life by assassinating the dictator and freeing the Paraguayan people. Combining autobiography, detective fiction, historical novel and philosophy, the novel examines the question of whether one man has the right to judge another. A provocative introduction and comprehensive notes by Helene Carol Weldt-Basson illuminate this translation of one of Roa Bastos' most important works.