"This sumptuously written thriller asks probing questions about how we live with each other and with our planet. The Cobra is a hard man in a brutal world. Expelled from El Salvador after a drug bust and working as a Guatemalan businessman's enforcer, he meets and comes to admire Polo, a human rights campaigner who defends the Mayan people. When the Cobra's boss orders him to murder Polo, a last-minute stab of conscience brings him into conflict with drug-dealing oligarchs. Now a marked man, he's offered a chance to escape to a remote Mayan community facing down its own assassin: the encroaching mining companies who want the land regardless of their impact on the planet. Can the Cobra change his solipsistic ways and learn to defend a culture caught in the crosshairs of another kind of battle? By the writer Roberto Bolaäno has called the most rigorous of his generation, Rodrigo Rey Rosa's The Country of Toâo is gripping thriller about power and redemption."--

Born and raised in Guatemala City, Rodrigo Rey Rosa is the author of five collections of short stories and more than a dozen novels that have been published in sixteen languages. Among his works available in English are The Beggar's Knife, The Pelcari Project (both translated by expatriate American author Paul Bowles), The Good Cripple, The African Shore, Human Matter, and Chaos: A Fable. Rey Rosa has been awarded Guatemala's national literature prize, China's Best Foreign Book Award, and, for his life's work, the prestigious José Donoso Prize in Chile.