A sharp, hostile, highly readable biography of Eva Perón, tracing her rise from poverty and performance into the centre of Argentine political life.

Written with the heat of a contemporary reckoning rather than the coolness of later historical distance, it presents Evita as actor, strategist, symbol, manipulator, benefactor, threat and myth-machine all at once.

First published in the early 1950s, shortly after Eva Perón’s death, the book became one of the defining English-language accounts of Evita and was later one of the sources behind the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It is not neutral biography, and that is partly the point: Main’s portrait is fiercely anti-Peronist, morally loaded, and often melodramatic, but also valuable as a document of how Evita was framed, feared, desired and politically weaponised by her opponents.

For readers interested in Latin American politics, women and power, political spectacle, cults of personality, populism, or the strange process by which a historical figure becomes theatre, icon, insult and saint without anyone agreeing which version is real.

Corgi paperback edition, published 1977. First published in Great Britain by Corgi in 1977; copyright Mary Main 1952. ISBN 0552106453 / 9780552106450. Cover has visible rubbing, light creasing, corner/edge wear and age-toned pages, but intact and readable.