Uruguayan writer Laura Chalar makes her American fiction debut in this interlinked collection of short stories, translated from the Spanish by the author.

Chalar’s fiction debut, THE GUARDIAN ANGEL OF LAWYERS comprises thirteen stories, all examining the themes of guilt and innocent, punishment, legal culpability, and moral justification. Here, a well-respected lawyer is haunted by a crime he committed in his youth. Violence between a young couple offers a harried criminal judge an unlikely chance for redemption. A controversial college professor enlists one of his students to obtain the skull of a murderer in order to prove a groundbreaking theory. In this collection of stories, many of them drawing from her experience of the legal profession, Chalar explores issues of morality and conflict, shedding light on our most questionable actions and on the enduring effects of things we do to others and ourselves.

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With stories set in contemporary Uruguay, attorney-writer Laura Chalar takes us into the legal world in this splendid collection of eleven legally-themed stories. The stories seem more Maupassant than Gabriel Garcia Marquez, more concerned with the characters of this world and their struggles rather than the dream-worlds of Marquez.

The first story here, “Head Start” ... sets the tone for the collection. Middle-aged lawyer Eugenio, in Montevideo, is “having a Day,” meaning that he can’t focus on his legal work because he’s remembering how he and three friends (all around 17) raped a girl, Cristina, 11 or 12 years old, the daughter of a servant at his friend’s house. Haunted by what happened so long ago, struggling to come to terms with it, he obsesses about whether or not one of his friends pushed him towards the girl—if that’s what happened then he can feel a little better about it. (In his lawyerly terms , “it will perhaps mitigate,” not exonerate).

Laura Chalar does not make things easy for herself—or us—in this first of a series of stories that involve her profession. Do we in some way sympathize with Eugenio, presented as a likeable, “decent” character wrestling with his past? Do we condemn him for his crime? Is he unpunished, or punished severely by the ravages of his guilty conscience? Chalar challenges us in this story and all the others here, showing that much as we’d like to believe that matters in law and in life are black and white and objective, more often it’s much more complex than that and needs the assistance of lawyers and a fine writer to try to make sense of it.

-Brian Daldorph, The Journal (UK)

The Guardian Angel of Lawyers is the latest short-story collection by Uruguayan writer and poet Laura Chalar.

Chalar divides her time between Buenos Aires and her hometown of Montevideo, where she works as a lawyer, and the legal profession is explored in all its facets in this perfectly crafted book of 13 short stories, each a delight to read.

Among my favourites are Head Start, about an upper-class young man who as a teenager took part in the gang rape of a local cleaning woman in a posh estancia in Uruguay, a memory that will haunt him many years later.

In Mortis Causa, a will involving an incredible library sparks a confrontation between a dutiful law student with his learned teacher and mentor, while The Guardian Angel of Lawyers sees a ghost following a young law graduate into her professional life.

Chalar has written a sparkling gem of a book where young lawyers, the legal profession and court life are mixed together in the most unexpected ways. A must-read.

-Morning Star