In November we read The News From Paraguay by Lily Tuck.
A National Book Award Winner, this is how The New Yorker described it via Amazon

"Tuck's historical novel of nineteenth-century Paraguay is told largely through (and sometimes in the voice of) Ella Lynch, a blond, fair-skinned Irishwoman who, while a courtesan in Paris, met Francisco Solano Lopez, the son of Paraguay's dictator. She became his mistress and, after Lopez (known as Franco) succeeded his father, she was the most powerful woman in the country. As an Irishwoman in Paraguay, Tuck's Ella is an outsider. But so, in a way, is Franco, a megalomaniac who builds a theatre modelled on La Scala and wages a disastrous war against Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Paraguay's malarial swamps and faux-European high society are the perfect setting for Tuck's dark wit, and her novel is quickened by such details as Ella's pink marble palace and her son's "necklace" made from the ears of enemy soldiers on a rawhide string. "