The Gods of Tango

Leda arrives in Buenos Aires from Italy in 1913, carrying a violin and expecting a husband. She finds a grave instead. To survive in a city that offers women few options, she cuts her hair, binds her chest, and reinvents herself as Dante — a tango musician in the underground milongas where the music is born. De Robertis writes the early barrios of Buenos Aires with physical intensity: the conventillos crammed with immigrants, the dance halls thick with smoke and want, the tango itself as a language for everything that cannot be spoken aloud. This is a novel about the cost of freedom, the invention of identity, and a city that was building itself from the dreams and desperation of people who had nowhere else to go.