The Gods of Tango [Paperback]

ASan Francisco ChronicleBest Book of 2015

An NBC Latino Selection for Ten Great Latino Books Published in 2015

Arriving in Buenos Aires in 1913, with only a suitcase and her father’s cherished violin to her name, seventeen-year-old Leda is shocked to find that the husband she has travelled across an ocean to reach is dead. Unable to return home, alone, and on the brink of destitution, she finds herself seduced by the tango, the dance that underscores every aspect of life in her new city. Knowing that she can never play in public as a woman, Leda disguises herself as a young man to join a troupe of musicians. In the illicit, scandalous world of brothels and cabarets, the line between Leda and her disguise begins to blur, and forbidden longings that she has long kept suppressed are realized for the first time. Powerfully sensual,The Gods of Tangois an erotically charged story of music, passion, and the quest for an authentic life against the odds.ASan Francisco Chronicleand NBC News Latino Best Book of the Year

Winner of the Stonewall Book Award

“Ambitious and audacious. . . . A rousing tale of sex, violence, exhilaration, poverty, luck and redemption.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Bold and mesmerizing. . . . Woven of many strands, the novel is absorbing, tightly crafted. . . . Passages hum in step with the tempos of the tango, seducing the reader to continue turning the pages.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“[De Robertis] is a natural storyteller. . . . The book’s relentlessly propulsive story of gender-switching in a perilous time . . . keep us rapt, turning the pages.” —The Washington Post
 
“[The tango is] a sound charged with the attitude and yearnings of Argentina’s immigrant class, its raw passions and unleashed frustrations. . . . De Robertis’s writing harnesses that l#K