"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