2009 books
46) Luis Sepúlveda, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, 1989 ( RE-READ )
This has been high on my list of likely re-reads since I first discovered it in 1996. A solitary, elderly man who lives alone at the edge of the Ecuadorian jungle becomes the one person who can track down and kill a dangerous ocelot, but he'd rather be left alone to read the tacky romance novels that he uses to teach himself to read. This has a memorable sense of time and place at the farthest edges of what's left today of Spanish colonialism, and Sepúlveda's lively, good humoured storytelling also comes with a subtle environmental message. He knows who he's writing for, which is something that probably helped this debut novel win a total of eight European literary awards. Actually better than I remembered it being the first time round, this one's staying on my shelf for keeps.