Blue Label

Eugenia Blanc, a young Caraquean and quintessential teenager at war with the world around her, has one aim: after graduating from high school, to abandon Venezuela definitively. She embarks on a spontaneous road trip in a banged-up Fiat with her rebellious classmate Luis Tvez, in search of her grandfather, the one person who can provide her with the documents that would allow her to leave the country. While Eugenia and Luiss tentative, troubled romance unfolds during the Chvez era, the story also looks back at Venezuelas lost decade of the 1990s, a time of intractable violence, inequality, corruption, and instability that led to Chvezs election. With an unvarnished fluidity that brings to mind Jack Kerouac and a crazy-ass playlist that ranges from REM to Bob Dylan to El Canto del Loco to Shakira, Blue Label is an audacious, dark novel with a gut-punch of an ending; the prize-winning first book by a writer who has cemented his reputation as a major young Latin American voice.