Tokens for a Dead Town

About this book

November 1973. In Chile's Atacama Desert, the military has turned the abandoned nitrate works of Chacabuco into a prison camp. Mathematics teacher Lisandro Torrico, forty-six, is marched off an army truck and assigned to the cracked adobe house where he was born, back when the company paid its miners in aluminium tokens. Somewhere under its kitchen floor his mother hid a tin she would never explain. As Lisandro searches the boards by night, his daughter Inés, who parted from him in a bitter quarrel on the night of the coup, travels north to get a letter past the wire. A young conscript who types the camp's lists holds the key to both of them. And in the 1920s and '30s, Lisandro's mother, Rosalía, runs a miners' kitchen in a boomtown that is about to die. What she did in the strike of 1931, her family has never been told.