Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

Unlike much of what I've been reading lately, this book was one I plucked off the new fiction shelf in the library with no review. I liked it a lot.

The story is about a woman who hosts a radio show in an unnamed Latin American country. The country has been ravaged by war and her radio show is a chance for people who have lost friends and relatives to say their names and hopefully find each other. In parallel, the woman has lost her husband to the war and she meets someone in the book who may be able to help her find him.

One reviewer compared the world Alarcon creates to that of Orwell or Huxley. I did not find it to be nearly as dystopic as that. Surely it was not a country I'd want to visit, but it was far more realistic and 'possible' than those other portrayals of the future. I found it to be more similar to Didion's Book of Common Prayer or Saramago's All the Names. Like those books, its being in a created country forced Alarcon to provide the historical backdrop, not just the plot. While I didn't think the history he created was entirely original (he seemed to rely on a composite of Latin American histories), it was well-developed and complete.

Considering this was a first novel, I thought it was excellent.