Book Review - One Hundred Guinea Pigs
= Peru made international headlines in 2022 when Ana Estrada, suffering from a degenerative muscle disease, was granted the right to end her life without her doctors facing legal punishment. Peruvian author Gustavo Rodríguez touches on this case in One Hundred Guinea Pigs , his bittersweet topical novel about assisted dying, which remains illegal in Peru. Originally published as Cien Cuyes in 2023, it went on to win the $175,000 Alfaguara Prize for fiction that same year and is Rodríguez’s first book to appear in English, in a fine translation by Daniel Hahn. In the opening pages we find Eufrasia Vela, a hardworking carer, on her way to tend to Doña Carmen, a lonely widow living in the affluent Lima district of Miraflores. It’s a far cry from Simbal, the village in the Andean foothills where Eufrasia was born. She takes on the care of Carmen’s neighbour, Jack Harrison, a retired doctor stoically enduring cancer and facial paralysis with the help of a whisky bottle and his beloved...