Set in Peru during the 1950s, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is the story of an 18 year old student who falls for a 32 year old divorcee. Mario, an aspiring writer, works at a radio station that broadcasts, live each day, up to a half-dozen short-run soap operas. At the same time that the author meets his "Aunt Julia", the radio station, which had been buying scripts by weight from Cuba, hires a Bolivian scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho to write the serials. The novel chronicles the scriptwriter's rise and fall in tandem with the protagonist's affair.

'The Feast of the Goat will stand out as the great emblematic novel of Latin America's twentieth century and removes One Hundred Years of Solitude of that title.' Times Literary Supplement Urania Cabral, a New York lawyer, returns to the Dominican Republic after a lifelong self-imposed exile. Once she is back in her homeland, the elusive feeling of terror that has overshadowed her whole life suddenly takes shape. Urania's own story alternates with the powerful climax of dictator Rafael Trujillo's reign. In 1961, Trujillo's decadent inner circle (which includes Urania's soon-to-be disgraced father) enjoys the luxuries of privilege while the rest of the nation lives in fear and deprivation. As Trujillo clings to power, a plot to push the Dominican Republic into the future is being formed. But after the murder of its hated dictator, the Goat, is carried out, the Dominican Republic is plunged into the nightmare of a bloody and uncertain aftermath. Now, thirty years later, Urania reveals how her own family was fatally wounded by the forces of history. In The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa eloquently explores the effects of power and violence on the lives of both the oppressors and those they victimized.

In The Call of the Tribe, Mario Vargas Llosa surveys the readings that have shaped the way he thinks and has viewed the world over the past fifty years. The Nobel Laureate maps out the liberal thinkers who helped him develop a new body of ideas after the great ideological traumas of his disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution and departure from the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, the author who most inspired Vargas Llosa in his youth. Writers like Adam Smith, Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin helped the author navigate through these uneasy years of intellectual formation. They showed him another school of thought that placed the individual before the tribe, nation, class or party, and defended freedom of expression as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy. The Call of the Tribe documents Vargas Llosa's engagement with their work and charts the evolution of his personal and philosophical ideology. Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world's greatest living novelists, but, as Clive James wrote in Cultural Amnesia, his 'true strength' is 'undoubtedly in the essay'.

'A modern tragedy on the grand scale.' Salman Rushdie The War of the End of the World is one of the great modern historical novels. Inspired by a real episode in Brazilian history, Mario Vargas Llosa tells the story of an apocalyptic movement, led by a mysterious prophet, in which prostitutes, beggars and bandits establish Canudos, a new republic, a libertarian paradise.

THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "A wildly enjoyable book; the 85-year-old Vargas Llosa is as sharp and mordantly funny as ever." Financial Times Guatemala, 1954. A CIA-supported military coup topples the government. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changed the development of Latin America: that those in power encouraged the spread of Soviet communism in the Americas. Mario Vargas Llosa has written a drama on a world stage, in which some persecutors end up as victims of the very plot they helped construct. Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.

'The most approachable and exhilarating Latin American writer of our times.' Robert McCrum, Observer In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. From one of the world's great literary intelligences, Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation - an impassioned and essential critique of our time, with essays on the disappearance of eroticism, on culture politics and power, and the frivolity and banality of entertainment in Western culture.

Flora Tristan, the illegitimate child of wealthy Pruvian father and a French mother, grows up in poverty and journey's to Peru to demand her inheritance. In 1891, Flora's grandson, struggling painter and stubborn visionary Paul Gauguin, abandons his wife and five children to paint his greatest works in the South Seas, when his dreams of paradise are poisoned by syphilis, the stifling forces of French colonialism, and a chronic lack of funds. Flora died before her grandson was born, but their travels and obsessions unfold side by side in the double portrait, a rare study in passion and ambition as well as the obstinate pursuit of greatness in the face of illness and death.

About the Author:

Mario Vargas LLosa is the author of fourteen books, including The Language of Passion, Letter to a young Novelist and "The Feast of the Goat . He was the recipient og the PEN/Nabokov Award in 2002 and lives in London and Peru.

In an isolated community in the Peruvian Andes, a series of mysterious disappearances has occurred. Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomas believe the Shining Path guerrillas are responsible, but the townspeople have their own ideas about the forces that claimed the bodies of the missing men. This riveting novel is filled with unforgettable characters, among them disenfranchised Indians, eccentric local folk, and a couple performing strange cannibalistic sacrifices. As the investigation progresses, Tomas entertains Lituma with the surreal tale of a precarious love affair. Death in the Andes is both a fascinating detective novel and an insightful political allegory. Mario Vargas Llosa offers a panoramic view of Peruvian society, from the recent social upheaval to the cultural influences in its past.

Felicito Yanaque has raised himself from poverty to ownership of a trucking business. His two sons work for him. He receives a threatening letter demanding protection money. The police don't take him seriously, Felicito refuses to pay up and gets sucked into a nightmare. He becomes a reluctant public hero. Then his mistress is kidnapped, and matters become seriously complicated. And he finds that his troubles have begun very close to home. His fate is interwoven with the story of Rigoberto, a wealthy Lima insurance executive. His boss and old friend, Ismael, suddenly announces that he is marrying his housekeeper, a chola from Piura, to the consternation of his twin sons, a pair of brutal wasters. Ismael escapes to Europe with his new bride, leaving Rigoberto to face the twins' threats, and their claims that he connived with a scheming woman to rob an old man of his fortune. Rigoberto is hounded by the press and TV. Meanwhile, his only son is having visions of a mysterious stranger who may or may not be the devil...

The Time of the Hero has been acclaimed by critics around the world as one of the outstanding Spanish novels of recent decades. In the author's native Peru, this powerful social satire so outraged the authorities that a thousand copies were publicly burned. The novel is set in Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, where a group of cadets attempt to break out of the vicious round of sadistic ragging, military discipline, confinement and boredom. But their pranks set off a cycle of betrayal, murder and revenge which jeopardizes the entire military hierarchy. 'A work of undeniable power and skill.' Sunday Telegraph

This is a novel of guilt and innocence and the impossibility of justice in an unequal society. In Peru, an airman is found brutally murdered. Two policemen set out to investigate, but they are not glamorous detectives they do not even have a squad car and have to hitch rides on chicken trucks and cajole a cabdriver to take them to the scene of the crime. The author has written "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter", "The War at the End of the World", "The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta", "Captain Pantoja and the Special Service" and "The Perpetual Orgy".

"A "New York Times "Notable Book of 2007
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""Splendid, suspenseful, and irresistible . . . A contemporary love story that explores the mores of the urban 1960s--and 70s and 80s."--"The New York Times Book Review
"Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him, he is doomed to worship her. Charting Ricardo's expatriate life through his romances with this shape-shifting woman, Vargas Llosa has created a beguiling, epic romance about the life-altering power of obsession.

As The Dream of the Celt opens, it is the summer of 1916 and Roger Casement awaits the hangman in London's Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the disastrous Easter Rising led by his comrades of the Irish Volunteers. He has been caught after landing from a German submarine. For the past year he has attempted to raise an Irish brigade from prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans against the British Empire that awarded him a knighthood only a few years before. And now his petition for clemency is threatened by the leaking of his private diary and his secret life as a gay man... Mario Vargas Llosa, with his incomparable gift for powerful historical narrative, takes the reader on a journey back through a remarkable life dedicated to the exposure of barbaric treatment of indigenous peoples by European predators in the Congo and Amazonia. Casement was feted as one of the greatest humanitarians of the age. Now he is about to die ignominiously as a traitor.

"A "New York Times "Notable Book of 2007
""
""Splendid, suspenseful, and irresistible . . . A contemporary love story that explores the mores of the urban 1960s--and 70s and 80s."--"The New York Times Book Review
"Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him, he is doomed to worship her. Charting Ricardo's expatriate life through his romances with this shape-shifting woman, Vargas Llosa has created a beguiling, epic romance about the life-altering power of obsession.

It was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century and Tolstoy called it "the greatest of all novels." Yet today Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" is neglected by readers and undervalued by critics. In "The Temptation of the Impossible," one of the world's great novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa, helps us to appreciate the incredible ambition, power, and beauty of Hugo's masterpiece and, in the process, presents a humane vision of fiction as an alternative reality that can help us imagine a different and better world.

Hugo, Vargas Llosa says, had at least two goals in "Les Miserables"--to create a complete fictional world and, through it, to change the real world. Despite the impossibility of these aims, Hugo makes them infectious, sweeping up the reader with his energy and linguistic and narrative skill. "Les Miserables," Vargas Llosa argues, embodies a utopian vision of literature--the idea that literature can not only give us a supreme experience of beauty, but also make us more virtuous citizens, and even grant us a glimpse of the "afterlife, the immortal soul, God." If Hugo's aspiration to transform individual and social life through literature now seems innocent, Vargas Llosa says, it is still a powerful ideal that great novels like "Les Miserables" can persuade us is true."

At a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer comes across a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the Amazon jungle. As he stares at the photograph, it dawns on him that he knows this man. The storyteller is not an Indian at all but his university classmate, Saul Zuratas, who was thought to have disappeared in Israel. As recollections of Zuratas flow through his mind, the writer begins to imagine Zuratas' transformation into a member of the Machiguenga tribe. In The Storyteller, Mario Vargas Llosa has created a spellbinding tale of one man's journey from the modern world to our origins.

In Praise of the Stepmother is the story of Don Rigoberto, his second wife, Lucrecia, and his son, Alfonso. Their family life together seems to be a happy one. Rigoberto, an insurance company manager, spends his time preening himself for his wife and collecting erotic art. But while Lucrecia is devoted to him, she has her own needs, and soon finds herself the object of young Alfonso's attention. With meticulous observation and seductive skill, Mario Vargas Llosa explores the mysterious nature of happiness. Little by little, the harmony of his characters is darkened by the shadow of perversion. If you enjoyed In Praise of the Stepmother, you might also like Mario Vargas Llosa's The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto.

When sexy, sophisticated, older Aunt Julia gets divorced from her Bolivian husband, she heads home to Peru in search of a new mate who can support her in high style. She finds instead her libidinous nephew Varguitas - a young, impoverished law student who works at a ramshackle radio station and aspires to be a fiction writer. Will their love survive the horror of the family? The shock of the community? The considerable difference in their ages? Meanwhile, a new, hotshot scriptwriter of racy radio soap operas, who turns out stories filled with murder, incest, rape, and perversion, has all of Peru listening in. Reality merges with fantasy as Mario Vargas Llosa juggles a madcap cast of characters and carouses through a world of forbidden passion, in a novel "The New York Times Book Review" named one of the twelve best of 1982.

Mario Vargas Llosa's A Fish in the Water is a twofold book: a memoir by one of Latin America's most celebrated writers, beginning with his birth in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru; and the story of his organization of the reform movement which culminated in his bid for the Peruvian presidency in 1990. Llosa evokes the experiences which gave rise to his fiction, and describes the social, literary, and political influences that led him to enter the political arena as a crusader for a free-market economy. A deeply absorbing look at how fact becomes fiction and at the formation of a courageous writer with strong political commitments, A Fish in the Water reveals Mario Vargas Llosa as a world figure whose real story is just beginning.

Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' (Bookforum), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.

Conversation in the Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of General Ordia. Suspicion, paranoia and blackmail have become part of life. The conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the degradation and frustration that has taken over their town. In this groundbreaking novel, Mario Vargas Llosa explores the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it. It is about identity, the role of a citizen and how a lack of personal freedom can forever scar a nation and its people.

Don Rigoberto - by day a grey insurance executive, by night a pornographer and sexual enthusiast - misses Lucrecia, his estranged second wife. The pair separated following a sexual encounter between Lucrecia and Alfonso, Rigoberto's son. To compensate for her absence, Rigoberto fills his notebooks with memories, fantasies and unsent letters. Meanwhile, Alfonso visits Lucrecia, determined to win her love. In The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Mario Vargas Llosa keeps the reader guessing which episodes are real and which issue from Rigoberto's imagination. The novel, a wonderful mix of reality and fantasy, is sexy, funny, disquieting, and unfailingly compelling. If you enjoyed The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, you might also like Mario Vargas Llosa's In Praise of the Stepmother.