Mario Vargas Llosa

"Guatemala, 1954. The military coup perpetrated by Carlos Castillo Armas and supported by the CIA topples the government of Jacobo Árbenz. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changes the development of Latin America: the accusation by the Eisenhower administration that Árbenz encouraged the spread of Soviet Communism in the Americas. Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in...

One day Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from Rolando Garro, the editor of a notorious magazine that specializes in salacious exposés. Garro presents Enrique with lewd pictures from an old business trip and demands that he invest in the magazine. Enrique refuses, and the next day the pictures are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique's wife is in the midst of a passionate and secret affair with the wife of Enrique's lawyer and...

Publisher description: It is 1961. The Dominican Republic languishes under economic sanctions the Catholic church spurs its clergy against the government from its highest ranks down, the country is arrested in bone-chilling fear. In The Feast of the Goat, Vargas Llosa unflinchingly tells the story of a regime's final days and the unsteady efforts of the men who would replace it. His narrative skates between the rituals of the hated dictator, Rafael...

Reality merges with fantasy in this hilarious comic novel about the world of radio soap operas and the pitfalls of forbidden passion by the bestselling author of The Storyteller. Sexy, sophisticated, older Aunt Julia, now divorced, seeks a new mate who can support her in high style. She finds instead her libidinous nephew, and their affair shocks both family and community.

"Mario Vargas Llosa's novel takes place in a Peruvian town, situated between desert and jungle, which is torn by boredom and lust. Don Anselmo, a stranger in a black coat, builds a brothel on the outskirts of the town while he charms its innocent people, setting in motion a chain reaction with extraordinary consequences." "This brothel, called the Green House, brings together the innocent and the corrupt: Bonificia, a young Indian girl saved by the...

Set in an isolated, rundown community in the Peruvian Andes, Vargas Llosa's novel tells the story of a series of mysterious disappearances involving the Shining Path guerrillas and a local couple performing cannibalistic sacrifices with strange similiarities to the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece. Part detective novel and part political allegory, it offers a panoramic view of Peruvian society; not only of the current political violence and social...

Toño Azpilcueta, writer of sundry articles, aspirant to the now defunct professorship of Peruvian studies, is an expert in the vals, a genre of music descended from the European waltz but rooted in New World Creole culture. When he hears a performance by the solitary and elusive guitarist Lalo Molfino, he is convinced not only that he is in the presence of the country’s finest musician, but that his own love for Peruvian music, as he has long suspected,...

A successful insurance company owner whose two lazy sons want him permanently out of the way crosses paths with a blackmail victim in Peru. "El héroe discreto narra la historia paralela de dos personajes: el ordenado y entrañable Felícito Yanaqué, un pequeño empresario de Piura, que es extorsionado; y la de Ismael Carrera, un exitoso hombre de negocios, dueño de una aseguradora en Lima, quien urde una sorpresiva venganza contra sus dos hijos...

"La idea de esta novela comenzo con una imagen de dos se?oras amigas que de pronto una noche, de una manera impensada para ambas, viven una situacion erotica. Luego se fue convirtiendo en una historia policial, casi un thriller, y el thriller se fue transformando en una especie de mural de la sociedad peruana en los ultimos meses o semanas de la dictadura de Fujimori y Montesinos. Megusto la idea de que la historia se llamase Cinco esquinas como un...