The Vision Of Elena Silves - Softcover

"Written with precision, clarity and rare beauty... Alongside Salman Rushdie and the late Bruce Chatwin, Shakespeare now joins the ranks of the New Exotics school" (Robert Carver New Statesman)

"A story of love and insurrection brilliantly told... A remarkable debut... one of the best books about the continent written by an outsider" (Sunday Times)

"An Englishman's novel of magic realism, flavoured with the more traditional English spices such as thriller and tourchsong, and a touch of Anglo-Saxon irony... A fine literary novel, combining several traditions and genres of fiction" (The Times)

"A dénouement that is unexpected, shocking and brilliantly conceived... I closed the novel with both satisfaction and regret" (Literary Review)

"The Vision of Elena Silves is a terrific novel" (John Sutherland London Review of Books)

In the Amazon city of Belén, in the heart of the Peruvian jungle, three old men sit on a bench. They sit in the square every day under the hot sun, remembering the women they loved and the world when it was a better place. One day a woman hurries past their bench whom all have reason to remember - Elena Silves, the girl with eyes as blue as the sky who once saw a vision and has been incarcerated by the Church authorities in a convent high in the Andes ever since. But the old men remember something else. They remember that Elena had been in love at the time with Gabriel, a student revolutionary who became the most wanted man in Belén.