Celebrated for his "ability to place a personal story in the context of a national upheaval and make it warm, funny and universal" (San Francisco Chronicle), renowned Chilean novelist Antonio Skármeta delivers here the story of young Ángel Santiago and his beautiful girlfriend Victoria Ponce, a virtuosic dancer and high-school dropout whose father was a victim of the regime. Joining forces with the debonair safecracker Nicolás Vergara Gray, this unlikely trio dreams of escaping an embattled Chile free from the Pinochet dictatorship but not yet free from its shadow. This "powerful, humane" (Publishers Weekly) novel "confirms that [Skármeta] is not only one of the most accomplished Latin American writers of our time, but also probably the most entertaining" (Ariel Dorfman).