The News from Paraguay

Tuck opens in Paris in 1854, where Ella Lynch, an Irish-born divorcee moving in the same circles as Napoleon's relatives, becomes the mistress of Francisco Solano Lopez, heir to Paraguay's presidency, courted with a poncho, a hired Paraguayan band, and a horse named after her. Ella follows him home to Asuncion and spends the rest of the novel reigning as his uncrowned consort, and Tuck's flat, almost diaristic prose, moving between third-person narration and Ella's own letters, keeps deliberate distance from Ella's interior life even as the reader watches her absorb, and eventually defend, Franco's escalating grandiosity.

That grandiosity drives Paraguay into the War of the Triple Alliance against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, a conflict so catastrophically one-sided it kills a majority of Paraguay's adult male population, and Tuck stages Ella's gradual complicity as a portrait of imperial ambition working by proximity: she never declares war, never issues an order, but her presence at Franco's side, her refusal to see the war as anything but temporary, and her own appetite for the trappings of a throne that was never legally hers all help sustain a fantasy that costs an entire country its future.

Tuck won the National Book Award while publicly admitting she had never set foot in Paraguay, and the novel's method matches that outsider's remove: dates and casualty counts arrive in clipped, unsentimental fragments alongside Ella's private correspondence, with almost no authorial commentary bridging the two registers. The effect keeps the historical devastation from ever becoming background scenery to a romance; it sits, unresolved and unexplained, directly against Ella's own account of her life, forcing the reader to do the work of connecting the war's scale to the woman who lived comfortably beside it.

Tuck occasionally breaks from Ella's point of view to let Franco's soldiers, servants, and even his horses narrate brief passages of their own, a formal choice that keeps the novel from collapsing into a single perspective's excuses. Those interruptions supply exactly the outside vantage Ella's own account withholds, ordinary Paraguayans registering the war's cost in ways she never does, so the reader's judgment of Ella forms in the gaps her narration leaves rather than in anything she admits to herself.