Ann Ireland
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Exile: A novel
Ann Ireland
If you think political refugees who seek asylum in Canada are romantic figures, you need to meet Carlos Romero Estevez, the feckless antihero of Ann Ireland’s third novel, Exile. Carlos hails from a fictional Latin American country named Santa Clara, where he was a journalist who fell afoul of the country’s most powerful general for purely personal, not political, reasons. After hiding out in a friend’s basement for four months, Carlos suddenly gets shipped to Vancouver where a group of earnest academic do-gooders have sponsored his asylum and landed him a cushy writer-in-exile gig at the university. The book plays back and forth between the expectations of the naive Canadians who are looking for a suitably grateful hero to worship and the selfish lifestyle of Carlos himself—he refuses to give up smoking, drinking, and steak dinners even as they break his benefactors’ budget; he’s used to having impoverished female servants around to do his cooking and laundry for him; and he hits on every likely female student or instructor who crosses his path.
Ann Ireland…
