THE YEAR is 1920, and Luis Agua, an authorised representative of an electricity company, arrives in Vila Natal, an inhospitable village in Portugal. His objective is to convince the inhabitants of the benefits of artificial light. Before long Agua learns that the village and the castle that presides over it hide deep secrets. A noble widow in decline, a will that is both cruel and impertinent, a pioneer of aviation, an epidemic and an unexpected ending; these are the ingredients of this novel in which the themes of love, revenge, humour, death and greed come together to form an almost arithmetic narrative.

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EDUARDO BERTI was born in Buenos Aires in 1964. He is the author of a book of short stories entitled Los pajaros for which he received an award from the magazine Cultura and which Pagina/12 newspaper considered among the best works of Argentine fiction in 1994. Agua, his first novel, was unanimously acclaimed both in Argentina and Spain and has already been published in France. His most recent novel, La mujer de Wakefield, was published in Spain in 1999 and nominated for the prestigious Prix Feminina in France.

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Afterword by Alberto Manguel
TRANSLATED BY Alexander Cameron
Cover photograph by Maggiorino Gramaglia
ISBN 1-901285-42-1 • 160pp • £10/ $14

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"Agua is beautifully structured and balanced...the translation has a nicely formal elegance. Pushkin have published Agua in an equally elegant edition."
TIM SOUSTER - Times Literary Supplement