Patagonia Route 203: Winner of the Premio Casa de las Américas

A road-trip novel that takes us on a journey of love and escape through the vast and magical landscape of Patagonia, where nothing and no-one are what they seem.

Parker is an enigmatic lorry driver who spends his days travelling up and down the infinite roads of a mythical Patagonia: an empty yet wildly beautiful landscape where people are brought together and separated by the shifting, omnipresent wind. Patagonia is a land populated by legends, adventures, and exotic characters, including a journalist on the hunt for Nazi submarines, cannibalistic Trinitarians who have given up eating meat, and a pair of evangelical Bolivian twins who dutifully guard a ghost train.

Happiest behind the wheel, or playing his saxophone, Parker crosses these strange plains to escape a mysterious past he left behind long ago. Parker finally finds a sense of direction when he meets Maytén, a strong and beautiful woman who works at a travelling fair. Soon, they are separated, but how will he find her in a land where directions change like the wind?

Eduardo Varela creates and reinvents, out of an inhospitable territory where nothing grows, an oceanic and extraordinary landscape. Patagonia Route 203 is an ode to liberty, to movement and to the beauty of creation.