Guillermo Macias disappeared in 1976, in Argentina's 'Dirty War'. Twenty years later, in 1996, his terminally-ill father was determined that someone should find out what had happened to him and why. He had the names of two men he wanted questioned one in Mexico City, the other in a prison on the Colombian island of Providencia but no one to ask the questions. A friend of the family suggested retired SAS hero Jamie Docherty, now living with his Argentine wife in neighbouring Chile. Marysa Salcedo had disappeared on a picnic the previous year, along with four other young women. Her family had given her up for dead when her older sister Carmen stumbled upon a Miami newspaper story that mentioned two of the friends. One had just died of a drug overdose; the other, half-deranged, told a garbled story of sexual slavery on a Caribbean island which sounded suspiciously like Providencia. MI6 and the British Government were also more than a little interested in the island. They were certain that a huge drug-trafficking empire was run from the prison, and knew that at least some of the profits were being funnelled by its Argentine 'guest' into the financing of a mercenary invasion of the Falklands. Ignored by the Colombian authorities and mysteriously obstructed by their American allies, the British had no choice but to send their own elite force the SAS.

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.