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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Book of the Week: Carmen Aguirre - Something Fierce

Book of the Week: Carmen Aguirre - Something Fierce: Episode 1

Factual: Life Stories

Something Fierce

Episode 1

Carmen Aguirre - Something Fierce

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Carmen Aguirre - Something Fierce, Episode 1

Carmen returns to Latin America with her mother and sister to join the underground.

4 Extra Debut. Carmen returns with her mother and sister to join the resistance against Pinochet's repressive 1980s regime in Chile. Coming-of-age memoir read by Mia Soteriou.

Born a week after the death of Che Guevara, Carmen Aguirre was always destined to become a revolutionary. After Pinochet's violent coup in Chile in 1973, her family is forced to flee to Canada. And when, a few years later, the Chilean resistance calls for exiled activists to return to fight the cause, Carmen's mother heeds the call. Determined to make mini revolutionaries of her two daughters, she takes them with her - and so Carmen's double life begins. Posing as a westernised teenager by day, at night she is drilled in surveillance techniques, cryptography and subterfuge, not to mention political theory and revolutionary history. It is a time of high excitement, but also one of fear and paranoia, of who to trust, and who to fear. 

From Pinochet's repressive rule in Chile, to Shining Path Peru, dictatorship-run Bolivia to post-Malvinas Argentina, this is a darkly comic coming-of-age memoir is a rare first-hand account of a life as teenage revolutionary. It is also the story of a young girl trying to reconcile her commitment to the cause with her very unrevolutionary new interests in boys, music and fashion. 

Today: dressed as an all-American teenager, Carmen returns to Latin America with her mother and sister to join the underground, and a new life of subterfuge and danger.

Author: Carmen Aguirre is a playwright and actor, now living in Vancouver. 
Reader: Mia Soteriou.
Abridger: Richard Hamilton
Producer: Justine Willett.

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Carmen Aguirre's memoir of her time as a teenage revolutionary in 1980s Chile

Carmen Aguirre's darkly comic coming-of-age memoir of her time as a teenage revolutionary during Pinochet's repressive regime in Chile during the 1980s

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