Buenos Aires, 1976: anti-dictatorship militant Silvia Labayru is kidnapped by paramilitary soldiers and taken to a clandestine detention centre. She is twenty years old, and five months pregnant. There she is tortured, gives birth on a table, performs slave labour, is repeatedly abused by an officer and forced to play a part in a military operation that results in the disappearance of five people. Over two years later, she is freed and goes into exile in Madrid, thinking that the hell is over. Yet she is fiercely condemned by her fellow Argentines as a collaborator, repeatedly faced with the question: what did you do to survive?Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero spent two years interviewing Labayru and her family, friends, children, lovers, and ex-militants. Accounts conflict, memories falter, interviews veer from seemingly stray details to the most profound experiences of terror and suffering, and Guerriero weaves it all into an astonishingly multi-faceted, complex portrait of Labayru. This is a story of the very limit points of human experience, of violence, captivity and struggle; but, as we learn of how Labayru rebuilt her life, eventually returning to Argentina and to a partner from her activist days, it also becomes a story of love, reconciliation and survival in the face of extremity.



Leila Guerriero is one of Latin America's most acclaimed journalists. Born in Junin in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, she began her career at the magazine Página/30. Since then, her work has appeared in many international publications, including Rolling Stone, El País, La Nación and L'Internazionale. The Call has won the Italian Premio Strega Europeo, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Buenos Aires Book Fair Critics Prize, the Zenda Narrative Prize and the Women and Media Chair Prize UDP. Her other books include A Simple Story and The Difficult Ghost, also available from Pushkin Press. Guerriero lives in Buenos Aires.Megan McDowell is a Spanish-language literary translator from Kentucky. Her work includes books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Lina Meruane, Mariana Enríquez, Álvaro Bisama, Arturo Fontaine, and Juan Emar.



Infused with the intensity of a thriller and with such poetic force, The Call is a masterclass. A hundred years from now, we'll still be talking about this tour de force



One of the great journalists in Spanish... The Call left a profound impression on me



Goes far beyond a portrait or a profile of Silvia Labayru: The Call is a book about love, violence, journalistic ethics, the truth and the terror of its scope. It is a classic - I write it without reservation - that rubs shoulders with and often looks over The Power Broker, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, The Year of Magical Thinking and other timeless works of narrative journalism



This new masterpiece finally squares the circle of the best literary non-fiction in Spanish... Guerriero has taken journalism to a new frontier... There is no judgement. There are facts, versions of facts, and the moral, that is, the thoughtful meditation on the fatal, ambiguous dilemma between death and survival in a pure, dark present. There is high literature. I know that reading La llamada, so addictive, will stay with me forever



Fragmented and multifaceted, this is a monumental portrait of terror and survival



Guerriero has painted a masterful and intimate portrait, disturbingly universal, which reveals abysses of suffering and helplessness, but where, despite everything, there is still space for redemption



A masterpiece of this millenium, capable of renegotiating the terms of what literature is today... One of the most powerful books I've read in recent years