In a remote Andean village, three men have disappeared. Peruvian Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Toms have been dispatched to investigate, and to guard the town from the Shining Path guerrillas, whom they presume are responsible. But the townspeople resent and mistrust them, and Lituma is baffled by their mystical practices as well as by reports of violent deaths nearby. To pass the time, and to cope with their homesickness, Toms entertains Lituma nightly with the sensuous, surreal tale of his precarious love affair with a wayward prostitute. Evocatively intermingling the corporeal and the spiritual, a suspense story and political allegory, Mario Vargas Llosa offers a panoramic view of contemporary Peru.

Mario Vargas Llosa is the author of sixteen novels, most recently The Bad Girl. He received the PEN/Nabokov Award in 2002 and lives in London.

"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

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