The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch — Anne Enright

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch is a dazzling novel from a writer of international caliber, based on the life of the nineteenth-century Irishwoman who became Paraguay's Eva Peron. Eliza Lynch met Francis Solano Lopez when she was nineteen and he was in Europe to recruit engineers for South America's first railroad. By the time he returned to Asuncion, Eliza was pregnant with his child. In less than a decade, Lopez plunged Paraguay into a conflict that would kill over half its population. By then Eliza was notorious -- as both the angel of the battlefield, inspiring the troops, and the demon whose rapacious appetites drove Lopez's fatal ambition. This is a gorgeous, deeply resonant novel of which Claire Messud wrote in The Irish Times, "In Enright's deft hands . . . we are lured to the heart of darkness."