The News from Paraguay

The News from Paraguay is a historical novel by the American writer Lily Tuck, published in 2004 and the winner of the National Book Award for fiction.

The book follows Eliza Lynch, an Irish courtesan living in Paris, from the moment the future dictator of Paraguay begins courting her with a poncho, a band and a horse. She goes with him to Asuncion and lives there as his mistress while he moves towards the presidency, in a country and a society that remain largely closed to her. The novel is built out of short scenes and pieces of correspondence rather than a continuous narrative, so the reader receives Paraguay in fragments, as she does, and the years covered run up to the Paraguayan War of 1865 to 1870.

The book was awarded the National Book Award for fiction in 2004, and its method, a sequence of vignettes and letters, keeps the reader at the distance Eliza herself experiences. Tuck holds the history at the level of what her characters can see and hear, and the war arrives the way it arrived for them, as news from a distance.