NEVER DID THE FIRE (Charco Press, £9.99), originally published in Spanish as Jamas el Fuego Nunca in 2011, cemented Chilean Diamela Eltit’s reputation as one of the most avant-garde and experimental novelists writing in Latin America.

The book, intelligently translated by Daniel Hahn, deals with the aftermath of the revolutionary political upheavals that took place in Latin America in the 1960s and ’70s.

The story is narrated by an unnamed woman, who is in a room with a man, also nameless. The two characters have endless disputes about the past; both were communists who lived in clandestinity, suffered betrayals and prison, but also an equally terrible event, the death of a child they could not take to hospital so as not to endanger themselves or their organisation.
 
One of the most fascinating things about this book is the Beckettian language the characters use to narrate their revolutionary experience, since from its emerges a central idea of the book, that of the couple as a clandestine cell.