"Alemán offers an illuminating story of the military dictatorship in Paraguay. . . . and the complex role played by its civilians. Fans of A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende will find much to admire."–Publishers Weekly
"Smoke is a truly remarkable piece of storytelling. In this compellingly meticulous narrative, Gabriela Alemán guides her characters to a suspenseful reckoning with their unreconciled histories in the South American backwater of Paraguay. In passages that alternate between the relentlessly vivid and claustrophobically dreamlike past and present, Alemán delivers a contemplation on human nature and historical memory that is as unsettling as it is unforgettable."–Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
"Alemán writes a uniquely Paraguayan magic realism that recasts the genre and echoes the country's tragic and tragicomic history. This is a beautifully written, haunting, and unsettling novel that lays bare the impossibility of disentangling personal and national stories."–Siân Rees, author of The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts
"Thrilling . . . with the Chaco War (1932-1935) between Bolivia and Paraguay as a backdrop, Gabriela Alemán weaves a rich and intense plot in which two generations fight against the violence of political power and nature."–Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Senselessness
"Smoke captures the essence of our continent: the tenacity and audacity of immigrants, their nostalgia for the world they left behind, the betrayals, humiliations, and entanglements that always arise between those who are newly arrived and those who were already there. In this novel, through prose that is precise and often painful, Gabriela Alemán constructs a fascinating mirror in which we must surely recognize ourselves."–Guadalupe Nettel, author of Still Born
"The best Paraguayan novel since Roa Bastos' I the Supreme."–El País
