Death in the Andes A Novel [Paperback]

In a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared. Peruvian Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tom?s have been dispatched to investigate, and to guard the town from the Shining Path guerrillas they assume are responsible. But the townspeople do not trust the officers, and they have their own ideas about what forces claimed the bodies of the missing men. To pass the time, and to cope with their homesickness, Tom?s entertains Lituma nightly with the sensuous, surreal tale of his precarious love affair with a wayward prostitute. His stories are intermingled with the ongoing mystery of the missing men.

Death in the Andesis an atmospheric suspense story and a political allegory, a panoramic view of contemporary Peru from one of the world's great novelists.

Peru's best novelist--one of the world's best. John Updike, The New Yorker

Well-knit social criticism as trenchant as any by Balzac or Flaubert . . . This is a novel that plumbs the heart of the Americas. The Washington Post Book World

Remarkable . . . a fantastically picturesque landscape of Indians and llamas, snowy peaks, hunger, and violence. Raymond Sokolov, The Wall Street Journal

Meticulously realistic descriptions of this high, unforgiving landscape and the haunted people who perch there . . . merge into a surreal portrait of a place both specific and universal. Time

MARIO VARGAS LLOSAwas awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat. Peru's foremost writer, he has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works includeThe Feast of the Goat,The Bad Girl,Aunt Juliaand the Scriptwriter,The War of the End of the World, andThe Storyteller. He lives in London.