School for Patriots

Winner of the prestigious Herralde Novel Prize.

An assistant in Buenos Aires' most prestigious boarding school, Maria Teresa's job is to keep the students in line. Suspecting that some of them are smoking in the school toilets, Maria Teresa takes to spying on them—an activity she gets surprising pleasure from. In this confined society all appears fair and liberal, but within there is brutal repression and the teachers draw up lists of candidates for torture. School for Patriots powerfully shows how in a dictatorship the political and the sexual interact.

Martin Kohan lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.