Tales from the Sharp End
A Portrait of Chile
Tales from the Sharp End: A Portrait of Chile is based on fifteen years of living and exploring the country known as South America’s California and offers a vivid tapestry of stories ranging from history and culture to flora and fauna, woven into the author’s own tales of adventure and heartbreak.
This book is both a love letter to Chile and a heartfelt lament for a country living at the sharp end of human folly and climate change. It is also highly topical and shares the author’s experience of living under siege during Chile’s social uprising that began in October 2019, as well as the realities of state violence and social inequality that have much in common with the global issues of Black Lives Matter and the Me Too Movement. 2023 was the fiftieth anniversary of the CIA-backed military coup in Chile, so this portrait is also a very timely fresh look at a country continuing to face major socio-political challenges.
What makes the book unique is that it is written by someone who has a personal experience or knowledge relevant to each chapter, be it history, politics or geography. Every story is not only a great read, but also supported by three decades of research and critical thinking.
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This book is both a love letter to Chile and a heartfelt lament for a country living at the sharp end of human folly and climate change.
REVIEWS
“Natascha Scott-Stokes offers readers the rare gift of combining an outsider’s skeptical peek into a foreign land with an insider’s keen grasp of Chile's cultural quirks and politics, dramatic turning points and unparalleled landscape. Tales from the Sharp End is a witty, richly colored gaze at Chile from within.”
Pascale Bonnefoy
Chile correspondent for the New York Times; professor at the University of Chile; and author of The Investigative Brigade.
“If you haven’t yet visited Chile, a most remarkable country, you will want to after reading this book. Tales from the Sharp End is a genuine pleasure to read. Natascha Scott-Stokes has an engagingly personal writing style, and her portrait of Chile is rendered evocatively in a series of unforgettable stories about the nature, people and history of the land she has come to feel a part of. There is humor and beauty here, as well as bittersweetness. In the end, this is Natascha Scott-Stokes’ ode to the place that she has chosen to live in and to love. Reading her, one cannot help but feel that she has given over a part of her soul to Chile, but that — delightfully for us -- it has been a reciprocal exchange.”
Jon Lee Anderson
Latin America correspondent for the New Yorker and author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
“A most welcome addition to the literature on Chile. Natascha Scott-Stokes gives us a broad overview of this remarkable land, weaving together natural history, Spanish explorers and colonisers as well as the country's troubled recent history.”
Mary Helen Spooner
Journalist and author, including of The General’s Slow Retreat: Chile After Pinochet.
“With a gaze that transcends the merely panoramic, and an agile and dynamic pen, Natascha Scott-Stokes weaves a great tapestry, revealing our most intimate nature, while also drawing us in to her experiences of living in this extreme country called Chile, over a period of fifteen years.”
Rodolfo Follegati
Chilean historian and author of Valparaíso: Between Utopia and Reality.
“Our museum’s mission is to develop a dialogue between the past and the present; to reveal the violations of human rights after Pinochet’s military coup of 1973, but also to establish memory itself as a human right. This is particularly important in a country like Chile, where memory in the shape of books, music and memorials has been suppressed. Natascha Scott-Stokes has laid a submarine cable between our past version of memory and memory today…and she allows us to identify faces and individuals that cannot now be lost.”
Francisco Estévez
Former director of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago de Chile, on the occasion of the book launch for the Chilean edition of Tales from the Sharp End: A Portrait of Chile, held at the museum 7th April 2022.
“A great X-Ray of our real lives…”
Pauli Bermúdez
Chilean literary blogger