The World We Saw Burning - by Renato Cisneros (Paperback)

About the Book

The bonds of family, and the demands of exile, compete in this gripping novel of love, war, and lives undone and remade.

Book Synopsis

Matías Roeder, a young man with an Italian father, German mother, and a sense of stagnation he is desperate to escape from, hops a boat from Peru to New York with vague plans but a firm intention to never go home again. This familiar story of migration--the odd jobs, the romances, the Bowery bars--goes sideways when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and he joins the US Air Force as part of a bombing crew. Matías is now Matthew, in the belly of a B-17, remade by the vertigo and rawness of aerial warfare. But the past comes roaring back when he trains his sights on his beloved grandfather's hometown of Hamburg. Matías's reckoning unfolds in the interstices of other stories, swapped by two more Peruvians - a journalist and a cabdriver - stuck in a present-day Madrid traffic jam, whose lives in Lima are now as distant as World War II was to their homeland. The World We Saw Burning is both a striking account of war and a reflection on identity and uprootedness in a time when everything seems on the verge of exploding or disappearing forever.

Review Quotes

"Uncompromising.... a rousing story of migration and identity." --Irish Times

"Cisneros shows great skill in interweaving two apparently independent stories, intelligently connecting them in an almost imperceptible manner at first, until one supports itself on the other like the backbone of the novel." --El Mundo

"Who is able to recount and connect, on the basis of a chance encounter between two Peruvians in a taxi in Madrid, the uprooting of the 21st century and its migrations and the enduring horrors of the 20th century? Only the talent and the voice of an exceptional author like Renato Cisneros." --El País

"Written with narrative dexterity and a rhythm that never falters." --Claudia Piñeiro, author of ELENA KNOWS

"A novel of extraordinary complexity, with dazzling prose, where the characters encounter history, the past and themselves." --El Mundo

About the Author

Renato Cisneros (Lima, 1976) is a well-known journalist, broadcaster and writer from Peru now living in Madrid. Having published a number of books of poetry and two novels, in 2015 he stepped back from his media career to fully concentrate on his writing. The Distance Between Us (Charco Press, 2018) sold over 35,000 copies in Peru alone and has been lauded in the Peruvian and international press. It was shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Biannual Award, longlisted for the Prix Médicis (2017) and was the winner of the Prix Transfuge du Meilleur Roman Hispanique (2017). Its prequel, You Shall Leave Your Land (Charco, 2023) was also a bestseller in Spain and Latin America. The World We Saw Burning, runner-up for the prestigious Alfaguara Prize (2023) is his most recent novel.

Fionn Petch is a Scottish-born translator working from Spanish, Italian and French into English. He lived in Mexico City for 12 years, where he completed a PhD in Philosophy at the UNAM. His translations of Latin American literature for Charco Press have been widely acclaimed. Fireflies by Luis Sagasti was shortlisted for the Translators' Association First Translation Award 2018. The Distance Between Us by Renato Cisneros received an English PEN Award in 2018. A Musical Offering, also by Luis Sagasti, was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 and won the Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán 2021 for best translation from Spanish. He now lives in Berlin.