The Estancia

I was reminded of Proust’s Combray when reading Martín Cullen’s moving and detailed evocation of a childhood spent among the sophisticated environs of Calle Juncas in central Buenos Aires and on several family estancias during the early 1950s.
[…] Written in prose that is often poetic […] The Estancia is a valuable record of a society that has now disappeared.

– Euan Cameron * Catholic Herald *
As a distillation of the complex puchero stew that is Argentinian identity – culturally in thrall to Europe long after independence from Spain – The Estancia is unbeatable … a superb meditation on memory: the past is another country … this is an immersive, beautifully crafted novel. * The Lady *
Deliciously unsettling … the voice, whether novelist’s or autobiographer’s, is unforgettable. – Jonathan Keates * The Literary Review *
Estancia is a marvel of poise and the high classical style… the writing has an incisive photographic clarity…the boy Cullen is a Tintin-like anomaly in his 1920s knickerbockers and beret…taken to France by his great-aunt Tía Tiode, a character out of Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt. – Ian Thomson * The Tablet *
use of language: rich, flexible and incisive … Something new on every page … in the sense of a turn of phrase, an image, an emotion cut at an unexpected angle … a strange work of art, Freudian rococo, opera in the jungle … a book like bottled smoke. – Duncan Fallowell
a treasure trove of sensation … enthralling, and the more so because its demi-Latin locale is nearly familiar yet exotically remote. – Stoddard Martin * Starhaven Press *
This is a dense and deeply satisfying journey into a faded Argentinian world. The narrator has the complexity and sensitivity of a poet and flexes his insight with all the care and ruthlessness of a surgeon’s probing knife. A delightful read – Nicholas Pearson
This lush, beautifully written and extremely personal book … the evocation of the Argentinian pampas … I defy any reader not to be carried away by the beauty of these passages. – Elisa Segrave
A sumptuous tapestry with a haunting personal narrative running throughout… this is not ‘magic realism’; it is literary magic of an old-fashioned order. * Decatur *