The Twilight Zone

The year is 1984 and Chile is under the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and gives his testimony to a reporter, who records it. As a child, the narrator of Nona Fernández's novel sees this man's face on the magazine's cover, beneath the words 'I Tortured People'.

His part in the regime's worst crimes, and his decision to speak about them, stay with her into adulthood and into her work as a writer and documentarian. Drawing on her imagination, she sets out to follow the man who tortured people into places the archives cannot reach, as though she were an agent sent back from the future.

What she finds is a shadowy borderland of history, where everyday things sit beside the regime's brutal and routine workings: morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the television series that gives the novel its title.