In 2007, Aurora Venturini stunned Argentine readers when her darkly funny and formally daring novel, 'Cousins', won a newspaper's award for a first novel. She had already written more than thirty books, but it was only at the age of eighty-five that she was widely recognised as a radical voice in Spanish-language literature. Widely regarded as Venturini's masterpiece, 'Cousins' is the story of four women from an impoverished, dysfunctional family in La Plata, Argentina, who are forced to suffer a series of ordeals including disfigurement, illegal abortions, miscarriages, sexual abuse and murder, narrated by a daughter whose success as a painter offers her a chance to achieve economic independence and help her family as best she can.