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Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Mario Vargas Llosa
Novel, 1977. Translated from Spanish
A semi-autobiographical tale of young love and radio soap operas in 1950s Lima, rich in everyday city life.
Books by country South America
Books set in Peru
Six books by writers from Peru, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and Death in the Andes.
About the literature of Peru
Peru's best-known writer is Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. His novel The Time of the Hero is set in Lima's Leoncio Prado military academy, while Death in the Andes is a mystery of disappearances at a remote Andean work camp during the Shining Path violence.
Writing in Peru is much older than the novel. Quechua, the language of the Inca empire, has a long tradition of oral songs and stories, and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, born in Cusco in 1539, set down Inca history in his Royal Commentaries of the Incas, published in 1609. Much fiction today is written in Spanish, and the distance between the Andean highlands and coastal Lima runs through a lot of it. José María Arguedas's Deep Rivers traces a boy raised among Quechua communities as he travels from Cusco's Inca walls to a highland boarding school.
By writers from Peru
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Death in the Andes
Mario Vargas Llosa
Novel, 1993. Translated from Spanish
A murder mystery in a remote Andean mining village, set against Shining Path violence and the gulf between highland and coastal Peru.
The Time of the Hero
Mario Vargas Llosa
Novel, 1963. Translated from Spanish
Set in Lima's Leoncio Prado military academy, it exposes the violence, racism and class hierarchies of 1950s Peruvian society.
Conversation in The Cathedral
Mario Vargas Llosa
Novel, 1969. Translated from Spanish
Two men talk in a Lima bar, unpicking the corruption and repression of General Odría's dictatorship in the 1950s.
Deep Rivers
José María Arguedas
Novel, 1958. Translated from Spanish by Frances Horning Barraclough
A boy raised among Quechua communities travels the southern Andes, from Cusco's Inca walls to a highland boarding school, in a lyrical portrait of Andean culture.
The Storyteller
Mario Vargas Llosa
Novel, 1987. Translated from Spanish
Alternates between Lima and the Amazon, following the Machiguenga people and questions of cultural preservation and indigenous identity.
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