#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER (The Globe and Mail)
A Globe and Mail Best Book [2011]
A Quill & Quire Book of the Year [2011]
A National Post Best Book [2011]
A BBC Radio Book of the Week [October 2011]
One of the CBC's 15 Memoirs by Canadian Women Worth Reading
[2015]
Six-year-old Carmen Aguirre fled to Canada with her family following
General Augusto Pinochet's violent 1973 coup in Chile. Five years later,
when her mother and stepfather returned to South America as Chilean
resistance members, Carmen and her sister went with them, quickly
assuming double lives of their own. At 18, Carmen became a militant
herself, plunging further into a world of terror, paranoia and
euphoria.
*
Something Fierce* takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru,
dictator-ruled Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet's Chile in
the eventful decade between 1979 and 1989. Dramatic, suspenseful and
darkly comic, it is a rare first-hand account of revolutionary life and
a passionate argument against forgetting.