Rosario Tijeras

"Since they shot her at point-blank range while she was being kissed, she confused the pain of death with that of love." So begins "Rosario Tijeras," Jorge Franco's eponymous novel of a violent, violated woman on the run in 1980s Medellin, Colombia. Her name-evoking the rosary and scissors--bespeaks her conflict as a woman who becomes a contract killer to insulate herself from the random violence of the streets.

Winner of Colombia's Dashiell Hammett Prize (2000), "Rosario Tijeras" is a work in the Latin American social realist tradition, possessed of fast and vibrant prose and poetic flourish. It has sold over 100,000 copies in Colombia alone. Translation by Gregory Rabassa, winner of the National Book Award for his rendering of Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch."