Global Initiatives: Peru: Fiction

An Indie Next Pick The eagerly anticipated new novel from the author of THE WATCHMAKER OF FILIGREE STREET--a treacherous quest in the magical landscape of nineteenth-century Peru. In 1859, ex-East India Company smuggler Merrick Tremayne is trapped at home in Cornwall after sustaining an injury that almost cost him his leg. On the sprawling, crumbling grounds of the old house, something is wrong; a statue moves, his grandfather's pines explode, and his brother accuses him of madness. When the India Office recruits Merrick for an expedition to fetch quinine--essential for the treatment of malaria--from deep within Peru, he knows it's a terrible idea. Nearly every able-bodied expeditionary who's made the attempt has died, and he can barely walk. But Merrick is desperate to escape everything at home, so he sets off, against his better judgment, for a tiny mission colony on the edge of the Amazon where a salt line on the ground separates town from forest. Anyone who crosses is killed by something that watches from the trees, but somewhere beyond the salt are the quinine woods, and the way around is blocked. Surrounded by local stories of lost time, cursed woods, and living rock, Merrick must separate truth from fairytale and find out what befell the last expeditions; why the villagers are forbidden to go into the forest; and what is happening to Raphael, the young priest who seems to have known Merrick's grandfather, who visited Peru many decades before.The Bedlam Stacksis the story of a profound friendship that grows in a place that seems just this side of magical.

The authorized, original edition of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning classic with a foreword by acclaimed author Russell Banks and an afterword by Wilder's nephew, Tappan Wilder, with illuminating documentary material about the novel and its rich literary history. "As close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature." --Russell Banks "There are books that haunt you down the years, books that seem to touch and stir something deep inside you. . . . Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey is of this kind." --The Independent (London) "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." This immortal sentence opens The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American literature, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a novel still read throughout the world. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk, witnesses the tragic event. Deeply moved, he embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention, not chance, that led to the deaths of the five people crossing the bridge that day. Ultimately, his search leads to a timeless investigation into the nature of fate and love, and the meaning of the human condition.

You have never read a book like this before -- a book that comes along once in a lifetime to change lives forever. In the rain forests of Peru, an ancient manuscript has been discovered. Within its pages are 9 key insights into life itself -- insights each human being is predicted to grasp sequentially; one insight, then another, as we move toward a completely spiritual culture on Earth. Drawing on ancient wisdom, it tells you how to make connections among the events happening in your life right now and lets you see what is going to happen to you in the years to come. The story it tells is a gripping one of adventure and discovery, but it is also a guidebook that has the power to crystallize your perceptions of why you are where you are in life and to direct your steps with a new energy and optimisim as you head into tomorrow.

"The novel tells the story of army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomas, who have been assigned to treacherous guard duty in an isolated, run-down mining community in the mountains of Peru. The men are homesick and far from enthusiastic about serving as foot soldiers in the Peruvian Army's ongoing war against the Shining Path guerrillas. So, to pass the time, Tomas tells the story of his great love, Mercedes, a troublemaking prostitute who leads him on a precarious, cross-country adventure. But life in the Andes soon turns eventful, too. Lituma and Tomas find themselves caught up in a series of mysterious disappearances involving the Shining Path and, soon enough, a local couple performing cannibalistic sacrifices with a strange similarity to the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece." "Part detective novel and part political allegory, Death in the Andes offers a panoramic view of Peru today - not only of the current political violence and social upheaval but also of the country's roots in Indian culture and pre-Hispanic mysticism."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A thrilling tale of desire and Peruvian corruption swirls around a scandalous exposé that leads to murder From the Nobel Laureate comes a politically charged detective novel weaving through the underbelly of Peruvian privilege. In the 1990s, during the turbulent and deeply corrupt years of Alberto Fujimori's presidency, two wealthy couples of Lima's high society become embroiled in a disturbing vortex of erotic adventures and politically driven blackmail. One day Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from Rolando Garro, the editor of a notorious magazine that specializes in salacious exposés. Garro presents Enrique with lewd pictures from an old business trip and demands that he invest in the magazine. Enrique refuses, and the next day the pictures are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique's wife is in the midst of a passionate and secret affair with the wife of Enrique's lawyer and best friend. When Garro shows up murdered, the two couples are thrown into a whirlwind of navigating Peru's unspoken laws and customs, while the staff of the magazine embark on their greatest exposé yet. Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, the novel swirls into the kind of restless realism that has become Mario Vargas Llosa's signature style. A twisting, unpredictable tale, The Neighborhood is at once a scathing indictment of Fujimori's regime and a crime thriller that evokes the vulgarity of freedom in a corrupt system.

Vargas Llosa's haunting work, set in Lima, tells the story of Cuban-backed radicals and their struggle against a crumbling military establishment.

"In this exciting sequel, Charlene, the friend who first brought word that an ancient manuscript had been found in Peru, has suddenly disappeared while exploring an old-growth forest deep in the Appalachian Mountains. Here, in this rich setting of cathedral forests, wooded streams, and majestic waterfalls, your adventure in search of the Tenth Insight begins." "It is a trip that will take you through portals into other dimensions ... to memories of past experiences and other centuries ... to the moment before our conception and the birth vision we all experience ... to the passage of death and the life review we must all face ... to the self-imposed isolation of hell, where fearful souls resist awakening ... and the love-filled Afterlife dimension where the knowledge of human destiny is guarded and held. And back on Earth, you will see the fear of the future that is endangering Earth's spiritual renaissance, and you will struggle to overcome this fear by exploring the nature of intuition, synchronicity and visualization."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE The action ofThe Time of the Hero, Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa's first novel, takes place at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Peru. There, four angry cadets who have formed an inner circle in an attempt to ward off the boredom and stifling confinement of the military academy set off a chain of events that starts with a theft and leads to murder and suicide.The Time of the Hero presents, with great accuracy and power, the cadets' nightmare life: brutal initiation rights, poker in the latrines, drinking contests; and, above all else, the strange military code which, whether broken or followed, can only destroy. WhenThe Time of the Hero was first published in Peru in 1962, it was considered so scandalous that a thousand copies were burned in an official ceremony at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy. That same year, the book received the Biblioteca Breve Prize, an award given to the best work of fiction in the Spanish language. "...[A]s with other fine writers, Vargas functions on more than a single level of meaning." -The New York Times

Clorinda Matto de Turner was the first Peruvian novelist to command an international reputation and the first to dramatize the exploitation of indigenous Latin American people. She believed the task of the novel was to be the photograph that captures the vices and virtues of a people, censuring the former with the appropriate moral lesson and paying its homage of admiration to the latter. In this tragic tale, Clorinda Matto de Turner explores the relationship between the landed gentry and the indigenous peoples of the Andean mountain communities. While unfolding as a love story rife with secrets and dashed hopes, Torn from the Nest in fact reveals a deep and destructive class disparity, and criticizes the Catholic clergy for blatant corruption. When Lucia and Don Fernando Marin settle in the small hamlet of Killac, the young couple become advocates for the local Indians who are being exploited and oppressed by their priest and governor and by the gentry allied with these two. Considered meddling outsiders, the couple meet violent resistance from the village leaders, who orchestrate an assault on their house and pursue devious and unfair schemes to keep the Indians subjugated. As a romance blossoms between the a member of the gentry and the peasant girl that Lucia and Don Fernando have adopted, a dreadful secret prevents their marriage and brings to a climax the novels exposure of degradation: they share the same fathera parish priest. Torn from the Nest was first published in Peru in 1889 amidst much enthusiasm and outrage. This fresh translation--the first since 1904--preserves one of Peru's most distinctive and compelling voices.

"His imagination captured by the account of a sixteenth-century Spanish monk who reported that the Incas "flew like birds" over the jungle and by tales of flying in Peruvian folklore, the author sets out to discover whether the ancients really were airborne - or experienced flying by other means. A shrunken head from Peru and a feather with traces of blood on it are his only clues when he begins his quest for the Incas' secret." "But soon he's trekking in the high Andes, where he pitches up at Machu Picchu, the Incas' most sacred city, and one associated with the condor. From the metropolis of Cusco he motors out to a mysterious island on Lake Titicaca. Gathering treasures, curiosities, and dubious companions along the way, the author follows his trail to the coastal desert and the baffling puzzle of the Nazca Lines. It was these inexplicable etchings in rock, so huge that the animal forms they represent can only be grasped from the air - that is, while flying - that Erich Von Daniken attributed to aliens in his Chariots of the Gods. Is it any surprise that ancient cloth from a nearby burial ground bears images of bird-men? After an encounter with a guinea pig-wielding shaman, it's off to the Amazon, where the author joins a Vietnam vet on an epic journey deep into the jungle to uncover the secrets of the Shuar, a tribe of legendary savagery reputed for their expertise with ayahuasca, the mind-altering "Vine of the Dead.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved