The Argentine literary sensation that has taken the Spanish-speaking world by storm: a dark, surreal and beautiful novel about violence, exclusion and love
‘It’s a fragment of the future’ Edouard Louis
‘Ferocious and magical’ Torrey Peters, Guardian
‘It will break your heart’ Mariana Enriquez
Auntie Encarna’s is the queerest boarding house in the world.
For Camila, it is a refuge, and the travesti who gather there are like family. At night they head out to Sarmiento Park to earn money. They stand together in the cold, sharing stories and a hip flask of whiskey, waiting for a car to slow down.
Until, one freezing evening, Auntie Encarna hears crying in the bushes and wades in to investigate. When she finds an abandoned baby boy, she will hear no arguments: she is bringing him home to care for him. Life for Camila and the others will never be the same again.
With a cast of larger-than-life, unforgettable characters, The Queens of Sarmiento Park combines brutal, unflinching realism with flourishes of surrealism to tell a story about the clash of hope with prejudice and fear. Wildly imaginative, darkly funny and devastatingly sad, it is a queer fairy tale about sex work, gender identity and chosen family; an anguished howl of pain and rage; and an unruly hymn to love and care on the outskirts of society.
‘A beautiful novel, moving, disturbing, raw and honest‘ Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season
‘Sosa Villada’s storytelling is guttural, tender, humorous and punk … an aesthetic that drips with the oral rhythms swept up from the dark streets of Córdoba into perfect streams of poetic prose’ Juliàn Delgado Lopera
‘Fun, tragic, political and full of marvel … It will break your heart and at the same time make you want to laugh and dance’ Mariana Enriquez
‘It’s a fragment of the future’ Edouard Louis
‘Ferocious and magical’ Torrey Peters, Guardian
‘It will break your heart’ Mariana Enriquez
Auntie Encarna’s is the queerest boarding house in the world.
For Camila, it is a refuge, and the travesti who gather there are like family. At night they head out to Sarmiento Park to earn money. They stand together in the cold, sharing stories and a hip flask of whiskey, waiting for a car to slow down.
Until, one freezing evening, Auntie Encarna hears crying in the bushes and wades in to investigate. When she finds an abandoned baby boy, she will hear no arguments: she is bringing him home to care for him. Life for Camila and the others will never be the same again.
With a cast of larger-than-life, unforgettable characters, The Queens of Sarmiento Park combines brutal, unflinching realism with flourishes of surrealism to tell a story about the clash of hope with prejudice and fear. Wildly imaginative, darkly funny and devastatingly sad, it is a queer fairy tale about sex work, gender identity and chosen family; an anguished howl of pain and rage; and an unruly hymn to love and care on the outskirts of society.
‘A beautiful novel, moving, disturbing, raw and honest‘ Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season
‘Sosa Villada’s storytelling is guttural, tender, humorous and punk … an aesthetic that drips with the oral rhythms swept up from the dark streets of Córdoba into perfect streams of poetic prose’ Juliàn Delgado Lopera
‘Fun, tragic, political and full of marvel … It will break your heart and at the same time make you want to laugh and dance’ Mariana Enriquez
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Reviews
A beautifully written and expertly translated work of autofiction ... Sosa Villada's tales of headless horsemen and women who turn into birds are a stunning meditation on gender, our bodies and the ties that bind
The Queens of Sarmiento Park blew Argentina's collective mind with its exquisite power, tenderness, and riotous imagination
A beautiful yet tragic story about sex work, gender identity and chosen family
Naked, glorious storytelling. Camila Sosa Villada's story shattered me and yet also, even in its starkest moments, convinced me that hope is stronger than despair.
An exquisite book full of poetry, warmth and magical, raw honesty. Gorgeously written stories of lives entwined and enmeshed in the toughest of spaces, stories which felt so bloody generous through the act of sharing. Simply beautiful.
A deeply poetic work about a group of outcasts who try with all their might to protect themselves from violence and exclusion through sisterhood, solidarity and joie de vivre
Sosa Villada's storytelling is guttural, tender, humorous and punk ... an aesthetic that drips with the oral rhythms swept up from the dark streets of Córdoba into perfect streams of poetic prose
From a life reminiscent of a Pedro Almodóvar film, Camila Sosa Villada has drawn an incredible piece of literature
A beautiful novel, moving, disturbing, raw and honest. In skilfully rendered language, charged with poetic energy, it takes us deep into the world of trans prostitution and explores the violent and tender bonds that unite the women who inhabit it
Stunning... Beautiful and devastating in equal measure, this had me reading right through the night to see how the story ends
An important book: fun, tragic, political and full of marvel ... It will break your heart and at the same time make you want to laugh and dance
A magical novel ... raw and full of love
Every so often, a slim book absolutely clobbers you with its exuberance and beauty - for me, this was that book
Staggering ... a dark and exuberant mythology of travesti life on the streets and in and out of the pink boarding houses of Sarmiento, Argentina. Highly visceral and audaciously real
This unflinching novel offers a fresh take on what it means to be a modern family ... ultimately, it's a story that will have you rooting for a charming mother and son duo, despite the odds being stacked against them
The most important book I've read on sexuality since Jean Genet. It's about friendship, desire, violence. It defies all the current frames of politics and literature, it's a fragment of the future
A literary sensation
In beautifully rendered language, this debut novel from Argentine actor and writer Sosa Villada challenges contemporary ideas of gender, sexuality and love with the magical touch of a fairy tale.
A work of searing, confrontational beauty
This novel celebrates trans life with lyricism and wonder ... A gem to be savoured
Camila Sosa Villada draws inspiration from her past in prostitution and the legend of an Argentine saint for The Queens of Sarmiento Park, a tribute to sex workers, suffused with magic
Confronting, radical, hopeful, The Queens of Sarmiento Park does one of the most important things a book (or a life) can do. It looks at all the rubble and the dirt and asks: "Can we make anything beautiful from this?"
This is a book both ferocious and magical, the story of a boarding house of trans sex workers who discover and raise a baby in Córdoba, Argentina. It's a trans iteration in a long tradition of Latin American literature: stuffed with marvels, humour, political critique, and storytelling that moves from macro to micro in the course of a paragraph. And yet, for all its specificity of place and culture, it's one of the books that best illustrates the themes that link together a growing movement of global trans literature, a book that unflinchingly asks, "how do we live?"