Luis Sepulveda · 1994 · exile

Luis Sepulveda's autobiographical stories, published in Italian as La frontiera scomparsa. A Chilean communist is imprisoned and tortured after Pinochet's coup, released into exile, and spends years crossing Latin America on what he calls a ticket to go nowhere - before ending up in the Asturian village his anarchist grandfather came from.

1. 1
   Santiago

   A boy taken round the bars of the capital by an Asturian anarchist grandfather who makes him urinate on church doors - and who at eleven gives him How the Steel Was Tempered, calling it an invitation to a great journey.

2. 2
   Puerto Montt

   A journey south with his father toward what Chileans call the end of the world - one of the tender pieces in the collection, and the last of the country he will be able to move through freely.

3. 3
   Temuco

   Two and a half years in prison after the coup, tortured by the military, and the friendships formed inside - which Sepulveda writes about with a lightness that is more disturbing than any amount of gravity would be.

4. 4
   Santiago airport

   Released and expelled. His father comes to see him off and is not allowed inside, so he stands outside the glass with his fist raised - and Ciao, vecchio is the story, and the whole book is arranged around that gesture.

5. 5
   Buenos Aires

   Argentina under its own junta, which is no refuge at all - and the beginning of what he calls a ticket to go nowhere, an exile that becomes a career of moving because staying is not on offer.

6. 6
   Montevideo

   Uruguay, and the pattern of the Southern Cone in the seventies: the same colonels in every capital, and a Chilean with the wrong papers working out how long he can stay before he must go again.

7. 7
   Ambato

   Ecuador, and the comic centrepiece: hired to ghostwrite a colonel's memoirs at a villa called Conquistada, fed and overpaid, until a workman explains the family mean him to marry the daughter and provide an heir.

8. 8
   Gijon

   Asturias at last, the grandfather's country, where the old anarchist came from and where Sepulveda ends up living - the vanished frontier of the title being the line you cannot cross back over, and the one place that will have him.