The latest addition to my website is Alfredo Pareja Díez Canseco‘s Las tres ratas [The Three Rats]. Alfredo Pareja Díez Canseco was an Ecuadorian realist writer as well as a politician, none of whose work has been translated into English. This novel tells the story of three unmarried adult sisters, whose parents have died, leaving them to manage the farm, on their own. They fail due to a combination of bad luck and inexperience and leave the farm to go and live with their aunt in Guayaquil. They are not particularly welcomed and their inexperience with life and men leads to further disasters. Pareja Díez Canseco shows in this novel the plight of women, particularly women on their own, in Ecuador of the time (first half of the last century).