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  • Published: 18 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9780141985862
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $22.99

On Heroes and Tombs



Sabato's masterpiece of obsessive love and murder in 1950s Buenos Aires, new to Penguin Modern Classics

Sabato's dark, philosophical novel is woven around a violent crime committed by Alejandra, the daughter of a prominent Argentinian family. Alejandra's act entwines the lives of three men: her father, Fernanda Vidal, a man who believes himself hunted by a secret organization of the blind, her troubled lover, Martin and Bruno, a writer who loved her mother. Exploring the tumult of Buenos Aires in the 1950s, On Heroes and Tombs leads its reader into a world of passion, philosophy and paranoia.

  • Published: 18 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9780141985862
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Ernesto Sabato

Ernesto Sabato was born in Argentina in 1911. He earned a PhD in physics before relocating to Paris. After World War II, he lost faith in science and began writing fiction, although he would burn much of his work. His three published novels are The Tunnel (1948), his masterpiece On Heroes and Tombs (1961) and The Angel of Darkness (1974). He also led the commission investigating those who disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War of the 1970s. Sabato died in 2011, two months before his 100th birthday.

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Praise for On Heroes and Tombs

A book with some claim to be the first major set-piece in that carnival of fictional fireworks which mesmerized Latin America throughout the next decade. It offers a rich motherlode of imagery, language and haunting scenes

Salman Rushdie

Bewitched, baroque, monumental

Newsweek

A novelist of immense power ... uncompromising and original

Colm Tóibín, Guardian