Under This Terrible Sun

A stoner travels to remote Argentina to identify the bodies of his murdered mother and brother. What could possibly go wrong?

Cetarti spends his days in a cloud of pot smoke, watching nature documentaries on television. He is torn from his lethargy by a call informing him that his mother and brother have been murdered, and that he must identify the bodies.

After making sure he has enough weed for the trip, he sets out to the remote Argentinian village of Lapachito, an ominous place where the houses are sinking deeper and deeper into the mud and a lurid, horrific sun is driving everyone crazy. When Duarte, a former military man turned dedicated criminal, ropes Cetarti into a scheme to cash in on his mother’s life insurance, events quickly spiral out of control…

A riveting, thrilling, and shocking read, Under This Terrible Sun will appeal to readers of Mario Vargas Llosa and Robert Bolaño. It paints a vital portrait of a civilization in terminal decline, where the border between reality and nightmare is increasingly blurred.

Carlos Busqued was born in the northern Argentinian province of Chaco in 1970. He currently lives in Buenos Aires. Under This Terrible Sun is his first novel.

‘A weird mandala of despair slowly rotating on the page’ Full Stop

‘There is a latent primal energy that courses just beneath the surface, but never actually breaks through… it's a harrowing journey’ The Indiscriminate Critic

‘Aside from the train wreck like inescapability of it all, the rubber necking that you take part in as a reader, the realization that as much as you want to you can’t look away, you can’t put down the book, you must keep turning the pages to see what happens next, even though you know it’s going to ruin you emotionally, as if you need more, a big part of what makes Under This Terrible Sun work so effectively is that Busqued refuses to let you escape the grasp of his chosen subjects for even a single second.’ Typographical Era