Description Hide Description- Show Description+
**A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2015**
**An NBC Latino Selection for Ten Great Latino Books Published in 2015**
A powerfully sensual, erotically charged story of music and romance, set against the backdrop of turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires.
February 1913: When seventeen-year-old Leda, clutching only a suitcase and her father's cherished violin, arrives in Buenos Aires, she is shocked to find that the husband she has travelled across an ocean to reach has been killed. Unable to return home, alone, and on the brink of destitution, she is seduced by the tango, the dance that underscores life in her new city. Leda knows, however, that she can never play in public as a woman, so she disguises herself as a young man to join a troupe of musicians. In the illicit, scandalous world of brothels and cabarets, the lines between Leda and her disguise begin to blur, and romantic longings that she has long kept suppressed are realized for the first time.
Author: Carolina de Robertis
Paperback Published 15 June 2016 384 pages
“Ambitious and audacious. . . . A rousing tale of sex, violence, exhilaration, poverty, luck and redemption.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Bold and mesmerizing. . . . Woven of many strands, the novel is absorbing, tightly crafted. . . . Passages hum in step with the tempos of the tango, seducing the reader to continue turning the pages.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“[De Robertis] is a natural storyteller. . . . The book’s relentlessly propulsive story of gender-switching in a perilous time . . . keep us rapt, turning the pages.” —The Washington Post