Trout, Belly Up by Rodrigo Fuentes
(Charco Press, £8,99)

GUATEMALA, Honduras and El Salvador — the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America — are countries enduring a wave of violence and crime resulting in some three million people having to rely on humanitarian assistance.

Hundreds of thousands have been internally displaced and many more have left their countries to escape the brutality — murder, kidnapping and extortion are the norm — and poverty.

Criminal gangs exert heavy territorial control in urban areas and social inequality is rampant due to narco trafficking, the weak rule of law and the corruption that has corroded public confidence in the state for decades.

Yet this is also a place of natural beauty, wonderful people and a multilayered history of cultures and races.

Those contradictions are all present in Trout, Belly Up, an outstanding collection of seven short stories by Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Fuentes, a finalist in the Gabriel Garcia Marquez short-story competition last year.

Fuentes’s direct, precise prose depicts an exuberant landscape where brutality and harshness are never far away in seven tales where violence, family ties and the paradoxes of living in rural Central America take centre stage.

There are stories of a divorced father who, while being visited by her small daughter, loses his pet dog and in the process all hope, a stepfather with Scandinavian roots who dares to confront hit men to protect his farm and a young diver who suffers a terrible accident underwater after a wild party that will change his and his family’s life for ever.

The main story of the collection, Trout, Belly Up, is the strongest. The protagonist, a man married to his cousin, is left in charge of a small trout farm in the Guatemalan mountains owned by an old farmer.

Everything seems to go well until an affair with a local woman and the sudden death of all the trout — lack of oxygen causes them to die belly up — transforms the narrative into a nightmarish tale of misfortunes and personal disasters.

It typifies a wonderful collection and places Fuentes among the most prominent names in the new generation of Guatemalan writers.