Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020 1872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through the pampas in the company of her new-found friend Liz, a settler from Scotland. While Liz provides China with a sentimental education and schools her in the nefarious ways of the British Empire, their eyes are opened to the wonders of Argentina's richly diverse flora and fauna, cultures and languages, as well as to the ruthless violence involved in nation-building. This subversive retelling of Argentina's foundational gaucho epic Martin Fierro is a celebration of the colour and movement of the living world, the open road, love and sex, and the dream of lasting freedom. With humour and sophistication, Gabriela Cabezon Camara has created a joyful, hallucinatory novel that is also an incisive critique of national myths.

A challenge to traditional male-centred accounts of the book world in 1820s' Buenos Aires. The woman question was a subject of discussion in post-independence Buenos Aires, reflected in the press and in the book world where writers contemplated the nature, role and status of women, linking the subject to topics such aspolitical transition, reform, modernisation, regional conflict and patriotic culture. This examination of a varied body of works dating from the 1820s, consisting of pamphlets, a history book, conduct literature and periodical literature, demonstrates the impact of transatlantic print networks such as the book trade, and translations from Britain, France, and Spain. Developing our understanding of the post-independence cultural landscape, the study investigates a hitherto unexamined debate that was at the heart of state building in Buenos Aires. It simultaneously challenges traditional male-centred accounts of the period and serves as a counterpoint to historic feministapproaches to print culture. IONA MACINTYRE lectures in Hispanic Studies at the University of Edinburgh.