Thursday Night Widows » (Translatio)

Piñeiro began her career as a journalist, playwright and television scriptwriter and in 1992 won the prestigious Pléyade journalism award. She has more recently turned to fiction and is the author of the literary crime novel 'Tuya' (finalist for the 2003 Planeta Prize), 'Elena Sabe' and 'Thursday Night Widows',her first novel available in English. Miranda France wrote 'Bad Times in Buenos Aires' which in essay form won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize in The Spectator magazine. A book by the same title was published in 1998 and met with great critical acclaim. The New York Times described it as 'a remarkable achievement' and the Sunday Times as 'an outstanding book'.

Desperate lives and prejudice in a society hiding behind gates and high walls.

Publishers Weekly

Near the start of Piñeiro's clever U.S. debut, which won Argentina's Clarin Prize for fiction and has been made into a film, the bodies of three well-to-do men—El Tano Scaglia, Martín Urovich and Gustavo Masotta—turn up in the Scaglias' swimming pool in Cascades Heights, a gated community outside Buenos Aires. The three men, along with Ronie Guevara, regularly had dinner on Thursday nights at one of their houses in this exclusive enclave. The search for the truth behind their deaths takes a backseat to the soap operaish goings-on of the Cascade Heights set, as seen in flashbacks largely through the eyes of Guevara's realtor wife, Virginia. Readers with an interest in contemporary Argentina will appreciate how this crime novel illuminates the hypocrisies of the country's upper classes after 9/11. (Jan.)