Cantoras: A Novel

"2019 was a rich year for characters who have often been erased from literature – because of race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. One of the best of these novels is Carolina de Robertis’ gorgeous novel Cantoras, which tells the story of five queer Uruguayan women who find each other in a small village at the height of the military dictatorship there in the mid-70s. The words gay, lesbian and queer are not even in their vocabulary in the early days – they’ve been erased, but they can still be punished for who they are, an essential tyranny that hangs over the novel. But Cantoras is, at its heart, a close character study of the women themselves – they are precisely drawn in all their virtues and flaws as they fall in and out of love and try to live their lives under the constant threat of possible violence. It’s that sharply observed character study that carries this novel, and is a fitting answer to years of erasure."