Her notorious reputation was invented by Paraguay's enemies in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay (who wiped out over ninety per cent of the male population of Paraguay in the War of the Triple Alliance of 1864-70), and by Paraguay's tiny Spanish elite who hated her glamour and sophistication. 'I represent Scandal, ' she ruefully admitted. The authors have discovered the truth about Eliza's Irish origins and the cruel deception of her marriage at the age of sixteen to a duplicitous French Army officer. They reconstruct the systematic invention of her image as a prostitute around her first meeting with Solano Lopez in Paris in 1854. Eliza Lynch was a courageous woman who was adored by the ordinary women of Paraguay and who tried to help many victims of an appalling war. The paranoid Lopez, on discovering that his family and colleagues had been conspiring against him, trusted only Eliza and their relationship became a love story of the damned. The book reveals why the Emperor of Brazil, against the advice of his generals, pursued Lopez to his death in 1870; Eliza buried him and their eldest son in the jungle with her bare hands. Eliza defied her enemies in a pamphlet she published in 1875 -- here translated for the first time -- when she returned to face her enemies in Paraguay. The authors' exclusive access to the unpublished journals of Eliza's daughter-in-law shows how scurrilous writers in South America, Britain and the US finally broke her spirit and how she died a 'burnt-out case' in Paris in 1886. In 1961 a later dictator, General Stroessner, declared her the national heroine of Paraguay.

A novel based on the life of the nineteenth-century Irishwoman who became Paraguay’s Eva Peron, from the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Gathering and Actress. In the spring of 1854 in Paris, Francisco Solano López came to the house of Eliza Lynch to improve his French, or so he said. Eliza was nineteen, already with an ex-husband, and he was the young son of Paraguay’s dictator in Europe recruiting engineers for South America’s first railroad. By the time he returned to Asunción in 1855, Eliza was pregnant with his child. In less than a decade, López plunged Paraguay into a conflict that would kill over half its population. By then Eliza was notorious—as both the angel of the battlefield inspiring the troops, and the demon whose rapacious appetites drove López’s fatal ambition. This is her story, in which “Enright artfully explores the power of beauty and the beauty of power, and finds them remarkably similar as neither leads to a good end” (Booklist). “The magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez . . . springs to mind.” —The Guardian “Water, an element as silvery and unpredictable as Enright’s extraordinary prose . . . transports Eliza from Ireland to Europe . . . to Paraguay and back to Britain.” —The New York Times Book Review

Escaping a desperate marriage at the age of 20, Eliza Lynch fled Ireland to Paris where her extraordinary beauty and intelligence won the attention of the soon-to-be dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López. Although the couple never married, Eliza bore him seven children and was seen as the queen of Paraguay, adored by the public and admired for her glamour and sophistication. But Eliza and Francisco's love was damned with the outbreak of the infamous War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), the bloodiest in South America's history. This is a unique love story, chronicling a romance that endured a desperate turn of fortunes, taking them from a life of royalty to a life on the run, and culminating with the now iconic image of Lynch burying both López and their eldest son in a shallow grave with her bare hands after they had been killed by Brazilian troops. Dubbed The Irish Evita, Eliza Lynch (born in Charleville, County Cork) was the most famous woman in all of South America in the nineteenth century. Her reputation was destroyed by the opposition in the wake of the War of the Triple Alliance; but in this story of wealth, war, love, loyalty, loss and, above all, survival, Eliza is revealed as a woman who showed extraordinary courage in the face a series of unspeakable horrors. The authors have discovered the truth about Eliza's Irish origins and the cruel deception of her marriage at the age of sixteen to a duplicitous French Army officer. They reconstruct the systematic invention of her image as a prostitute around her first meeting with Solano López in Paris in 1854. Eliza Lynch was a courageous woman who was adored by the ordinary women of Paraguay and who tried to help many victims of an appalling war. The paranoid López, on discovering that his family and colleagues had been conspiring against him, trusted only Eliza and their relationship became a love story of the damned. The book reveals why the Emperor of Brazil, against the advice of his generals, pursued López to his death in 1870; Eliza buried him and their eldest son in the jungle with her bare hands. Eliza defied her enemies in a pamphlet she published in 1875 – here translated for the first time – when she returned to face her enemies in Paraguay. The authors' exclusive access to the unpublished journals of Eliza's daughter-in-law shows how scurrilous writers in South America, Britain and the US finally broke her spirit and how she died a 'burnt-out case' in Paris in 1886. In 1961 a later dictator, General Stroessner, declared her the national heroine of Paraguay. This book restores her to her rightful place among the most remarkable and brave women in modern history. Now a subject of a new Irish documentary by Alan Gilsenan, the film that helps rescue one of the great Irish lives of the 19th century from obscurity while opening a fascinating window onto what is perhaps South America's least-known country and the apocalyptic conflagration that still haunts its society.

'La señora Elisa Alicia Lynch is the greatest heroine of America' In 1854, an ambitious Irish courtesan met a South American General in Paris and returned with him to Paraguay. When he became President, she became his de facto first lady and together they changed the course of the country's history. Consumed by desire for Napoleonic glory, General President Lopez took Paraguay into a disastrous war against her neighbours. Elisa Lynch went with him on campaign, turning conditions of war to her advantage where she could. He was killed in the northern hills but she survived, only to be expelled from Paraguay and die an obscure death in Paris. Reviled and respected, loved and distrusted, Elisa Lynch has been described as both a heroic companion to Lopez and a malign enchantress. In The Shadows of Elisa Lynch, Siân Rees tells her fascinating story of recovered history.

Born in Ireland in the 1840's, Eliza Lynch left the country as a young girl, fleeing the potato famine with her parents. As a young woman, she became one of Paris most celebrated courtesans, until she was persuaded by the son of the dictator of Paraguay, to leave Paris for South America, where he promised he would make her Empress of the entire continent. Back in Asuncion, they embarked on a programme of extravagant building (the grandiose buildings they commissioned included a replica of the Palais Garnier), acquisition (Eliza's collection of jewellery was legendary), hospitality (Eliza was known to attend balls dressed as Elizabeth I, highly impractical, given the weather) and, finally, war. Paraguay declared war on a coalition that included not only all the other states in S American, but also the USA, France and Britain. By the time their reign was over, Paraguay's population had been devastated. Eliza died in poverty in Paris. Buried in Pere Lachaise, her corpse was dead up by dead of night in 1961, and smuggled back to Paraguay, where General Stroessner planned, despite the condemnation of the Church, to make her the centre of an Evita-style cult. Her body lies there to this

A crowd of siblings gathers in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother in this “stunning” novel by the award-winning author of Actress (The Washington Post). The surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering for the wake of their wayward, alcoholic brother, Liam, drowned in the sea after filling his pockets with stones. He is the third of the twelve Hegarty siblings to die. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him—something that happened in their grandmother’s house in the winter of 1968. As prize-winning author Anne Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption through three generations, her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction and gives it back to us in a new and unforgettable light. The Gathering is an “wonderfully elegant and unsparing” epic of an Irish family (Los Angeles Times)—a novel about love and disappointment, how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars. “Entrancing…a haunting look at a broken family stifled by generations of hurt and disappointment, struggling to make peace with the irreparable.”—Entertainment Weekly “A melancholic love and rage bubbles just beneath the surface of this Dublin clan, and Enright explores it unflinchingly.”—Publishers Weekly “Her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott’s; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O’Brien’s. The Gathering is her best book.”—Colm Toibin “Hypnotic.”—Booklist (starred review)

From the author of City of Silver, a beautifully rich and puzzling historical mystery set in Paraguay, 1868 A war against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay has devastated Paraguay. Ninety percent of the males between the ages of eight and eighty have died in the conflict and food is scarce. In the small village of Santa Caterina, Padre Gregorio advises the women of his congregation to abandon the laws of the church and get pregnant by what men are available. As he leaves the pulpit, he discovers the murdered body of Ricardo Yotté, one of the most powerful men in the country, at the bottom of the belfry. There are many suspects: Eliza Lynch, a former Parisian courtesan who is now the consort of the brutal dictator, Francisco Solano López, and who entrusted to Yotté the country's treasury of gold and jewels; López himself, who may have suspected his ally Yotté of carrying on an affair with the beautiful Eliza; Comandante Luis Menenez, local representative of the dictator, who competed with Yotté for López's favor, and a wounded Brazilian soldier who has secretly taken up with one of the village girls. Lynch is desperate to recover the missing gold, and the comandante is desperate to prove his usefulness to López. To avoid having an innocent person dragged off to torture and death, a band of villagers undertake to solve the crime, including Padre Gregorio, the village midwife, her crippled husband returned from combat, their spirited daughter, and a war widow. Each carries secrets they seek to protect from the others, while they pursue their quest for the truth. Lyrical, complex, and meticulously researched, Annamaria Alfieri's Invisible Country is an ingenious cross between Isabel Allende and Agatha Christie.