Death in the Andes - by Mario Vargas Llosa (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published in Spanish as Lituma en los Andes.

Book Synopsis

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 upheaval, but also of the country's past and its connection to Indian culture and pre-Hispanic mysticism.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru in 1936. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." He also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor. His many works of fiction and nonfiction include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, all published by FSG. He died in Lima at age 89 in 2025.