The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch is a dazzling novel from a writer of international caliber, based on the life of the nineteenth-century Irishwoman who became Paraguay's Eva Peron. Eliza Lynch met Francisco Solano López in Paris, when she was nineteen and he was in Europe to recruit engineers for the first railroad in South America. He left several months later with a pregnant Eliza beside him. Reviled by Asunción society and the family of her lover, who never married her, Eliza nevertheless had her son baptized his heir. In less than a decade, López became dictator and plunged Paraguay into a conflict that would kill over half its population. By then Eliza was notorious-as both the angel of the battlefield, inspiring the troops, and the demon driving López's ambition-and when López was killed in battle, she buried him in a shallow grave dug with her own hands. Anne Enright has written a gorgeous, deeply resonant novel.