The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

Book excerpt: 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