Description
This book, written by the renowned Costa Rican author José León Sánchez, is about the inhumane conditions experienced in the San Lucas prison in Costa Rica.
In first person narrative, a man tells the story of being unjustly accused of murder and sentenced to forced labor, his journey to the San Lucas prison, his terrible experience in the feared place, the abuses suffered by the men locked up there, and the chronic hunger reflected on the faces of the prisoners.
This book is the most translated work of Costa Rican literature and the most internationally known. The Nobel Prize in Literature, Camilo José Cela, said about it: «Two eerie and astonishing parallels unite two of the books that have impressed me the most throughout my life: ‘The Bandit Queen’ by Phoolan Devi, in her book published in New Delhi in 1995; and ‘La isla de los hombres solos’ by the Mesoamerican writer José León Sánchez. The authorities of Madhya Pradesh banned the first one from even stepping foot on the land where she was born. The second one, the man turned into a ruthless wolf, was denied the ten minutes of sun to which he was entitled according to the law for many years…»
About the author
José León Sánchez (1929-2022) was a Costa Rican intellectual and writer considered one of the most outstanding authors of the 20th century in Ibero-America. At the age of 21, he was sentenced to prison for the theft of the jewels of the Virgin of Los Ángeles, the patron saint of Costa Rica, a crime for which he was finally acquitted in 1999, after serving 30 years in prison and fighting all his life to prove his innocence.
He published 30 books, with the most notable ones being «La isla de los hombres solos,» which narrates the events that took place in the San Lucas prison in the Costa Rican Pacific, where he learned to read and write; and «Tenochtitlan: la última batalla de los aztecas,» highly recognized in Mexico for narrating the history of the conquest from the perspective of the losers. He received several awards throughout his life, including the Magón Culture Award 2017 in Costa Rica and the Nelson Mandela Award from the National Human Rights Commission in 2018 for his work in favor of human rights. His books have been translated into English, Italian, Russian, German, Dutch, French, and Mandarin. He is the most read and well-known Costa Rican writer in the world.