El rehén

"Mom was like a karaoke song we could never quite keep up with, no matter how hard we tried," says Cristian, Tavo’s older brother and the narrator of this brief yet intense tragicomic novel. Their mother is La Tunta; determined to fulfill her dream of becoming an independent woman, she leaves her husband—and the minibus they drove together—to strike out on her own as a minibus driver in a small, papaya-colored vehicle. The boys' father, Chuño Yupanqui—spurned and drowning in debt—decides to stage his children's kidnapping to extort money from his ex-wife. He takes the boys to a house on the outskirts of La Paz, where they—silent accomplices to their father's elaborate lie—quickly make new friends and form a kind of society that exists apart from the adult world, yet is just as eccentric.