The Memory Stones by Caroline Brothers

Buenos Aires, 1976. Osvaldo Ferrero and his wife Yolanda escape the city's heat with their daughters, sensible Julieta and wilful Graciela, who is nineteen and madly in love. They will be the last days the family ever spends together. On their return to Buenos Aires, the Argentine military stages a coup. Friends vanish overnight, and Osvaldo, too, is forced to flee. When Graciela herself is abducted, Osvaldo can only witness the disintegration of his family from afar, while Yolanda fights on the ground for some trace of their beloved daughter. Soon, she realises they may be fighting for an unknown grandchild as well.

The Memory Stones tells the story of the Disappeared, thousands of Argentinians who fell victim to the violence of the period. Depicting the despair and hope of one family as it seeks to rebuild after unimaginable loss, it is a devastating portrait of a country that has come face to face with terror, and the long dark shadow it leaves behind.

Caroline Brothers was born in Australia. She has a PHD in history from University College London and has worked as a foreign correspondent in Europe and Latin America, as a journalist at the International New York Times.

She is the author of War And Photography, and the novel Hinterland. She divides her time between London and Paris.

Q&A

When I write I like to...
…start off with an enormous mug of green tea and progress to espresso by the afternoon.

The book that inspired me to write is…
… The Snow Goose, by Paul Gallico. It’s a novella that is seen as terribly sentimental now, but at 10 years of age it made me realise that books could contain a whole world of emotion, and I was completely awestruck. From then on, writing was all I wanted to do. I loved Gallico’s stark and solitary characters, the descriptions of the English coastline, the snow geese (of course), and the heroic fishing boats that set off to rescue the Allied soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk.

My specialty in the kitchen is…
...I can make a great orange and seafood pasta when I put my mind to it.

My current view is of…
…a tropical-looking bower of greenery that has attracted all sorts of birdlife, including their tiny offspring who are hopping around learning to fly.

One of my favorite writers is…
...The American short-story writer Edith Perlman, because of her wickedly sharp observations of human nature. She is very oblique and subtle, and seems to be simply recording the way people behave towards each other, but it’s what she selects to tell you that exposes her characters’ pretentions and the way they lie to themselves.

One thing people don't know about me is...
...hmmm, perhaps it’s best kept that way…

The thing I love most about words is...
… their weird and wonderful origins. When I’m (meant to be) writing, I spend far too much time snooping around the wonderful Online Etymological Dictionary which tells you where any particular word in English has come from. Look up the word ‘albatross’, and you learn that it comes from the Arabic word for pelican and got mistakenly applied by English sailors to the wrong seabird.