The Lightning of August

Blurb

Los relámpagos de agosto was the first novel written by Mexican author Jorge Ibargüengoitia. Published for the first time in 1964, it parodies the memories written by veterans of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the armed revolts that continued to destabilize the country for the next two decades.
Since many of such veterans had joined the Institutional Revolutionary Party —a political organization that had ruled Mexico by rigging elections and engaging in massive corruption and cronyism for most of the 20th century— the topic was still considered somewhat off-limits by the governing regime at the time of its publication.
Critically, it went on to receive the 1964 Casa de las Américas annual prize for novel, it has been distributed among Mexican public schools through the National Reading Program and it was selected by the Guadalajara International Book Fair to celebrate the 2010 World Book Day.