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.

CARMEN AGUIRRE is a Vancouver-based writer and theatre artist who has worked extensively in North and South America. She has written or co-written 20 plays, including The Refugee Hotel, which was nominated for a 2010 Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play. Her most recent one-woman show is Blue Box. Aguirre has 60 film, TV and stage acting credits, including lead roles in the Showcase series Endgame andQuinceañera, winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Something Fierce won Canada Reads in 2012, was a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize, and was a #1 National Bestseller.