Something Fierce

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER (The Globe and Mail)

A Globe and Mail Best Book 2011]

A Quill & Quire Book of the Year 2011]

A National Post Best Book 2011]

A BBC Radio Book of the Week October 2011]

One of the CBC's 15 Memoirs by Canadian Women Worth Reading 2015]

Six-year-old Carmen Aguirre fled to Canada with her family following General Augusto Pinochet's violent 1973 coup in Chile. Five years later, when her mother and stepfather returned to South America as Chilean resistance members, Carmen and her sister went with them, quickly assuming double lives of their own. At 18, Carmen became a militant herself, plunging further into a world of terror, paranoia and euphoria.

Something Fierce takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru, dictator-ruled Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet's Chile in the eventful decade between 1979 and 1989. Dramatic, suspenseful and darkly comic, it is a rare first-hand account of revolutionary life and a passionate argument against forgetting.