Konfidenz - Paperback

by Ariel Dorfman (Author)

The political and the personal become blurred in a series of tense, tantalizing conversations about resistance.

A pared-back yet gripping psychological novel from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden and Allegro.

A woman travels to Paris to meet her lover. When she arrives at her hotel, however, she receives a call from a mysterious stranger claiming to be his friend, who somehow possesses intimate knowledge of their lives and why she fled her homeland. Over the course of nine hours, this man will draw her in, revealing details about her lover's work, which could put him in grave danger, and the growing conflict that has ensnared them all.

A brilliant, mind-bending story told almost entirely through dialogue, Konfidenz upends what we think we know, painting an insightful portrait of manipulation and divided loyalties. Taking inspiration from his own experiences of political turmoil and exile after the 1973 coup that overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende, Ariel Dorfman infuses this novel with a remarkable urgency and authenticity.

Author Biography

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels The Suicide Museum (Other Press, 2023), Allegro (Other Press, 2025), Widows, and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. He writes regularly for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, El País, and CNN. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, The Threepenny Review, and Index on Censorship, among others. A prominent human rights activist, he worked as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende's chief of staff in the final months before the 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He lives with his wife Angélica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.