Tarantula

Brought to you by Penguin.Winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger in France and the Premio de la Critica in SpainConversation-starting and prize-winning international fiction: an extraordinary meditation on violence, conspiracy and the many complex afterlives of the Holocaust Eduardo and his brother have been living in the US for three years when their parents send them back to Guatemala for the holidays. It is 1984 and their native country, in the midst of a violent civil war, feels newly alien to them – their Spanish faltering, already half-forgotten. Their grandfather collects the boys from the airport and drives them into the mountains, depositing them at what they’re told is a Jewish summer camp.At the camp, the children meet a counsellor called Samuel Blum: a handsome young man with sky-blue eyes who knows about all kinds of things. He shows them how to make a survival shelter out of branches and leaves, and how to kindle a fire using a glass bottle. He sings songs with