The latest addition to my website is Bernardo Carvalho‘s Mongólia [Mongolia]. A young Brazilian, son of an important CEO, goes missing in Mongolia and a diplomat, working temporarily in the Brazilian Embassy in Beijing, is sent off to find him, though he is seemingly reluctant to do so. He eventually gets some idea why the missing son had disappeared, involving Buddhist goddesses, a diary in Tibetan and a young Buddhist nun who is raped by an abbot but later helps him to flee Mongolia when Stalin closes down the monasteries and murders the monks in 1937. Our diplomat (none of the Brazilian characters are named) has to hire a guide and heads off to the remote parts of Mongolia looking for the missing son, with a host of problems involving weather, insects and unreliable informants but beautiful landscape, all made more complicated by the diplomat’s impatience and impetuosity. It is a superb book, wonderfully told, with a completely unexpected twist. Sadly it is available in French, German and Italian but not English.