Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in Lima in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting 'Comrade Arlette', an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit an icy, remote one, who denies knowing anything about the Lily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as - whether it's Madam Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official, or Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman - and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her.

Gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse - does Ricardo ever know who she really is? The answer is as unclear as what has become of Ricardo himself, a lifelong expatriate shadowed by the sense that he is only ever drifting. In Mario Vargos Llosa's beguiling new novel, the strange bedfellows of good and bad turn out not to be what they appear.

About The Author
Mario Vargas Llosa With novels including The War of the End of the World, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto and The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa has established an international reputation as one of the Latin America's most important authors.

He was born in Peru in 1936 and educated at university in Lima, where he studied Humanities and Law. Later, a scholarship took him to Madrid and, having gained his PhD, he moved to Paris not knowing that he would live and work in Europe for the next eighteen years. He returned to Lima in 1974, although he makes regular trips to Europe.

Always politically outspoken, from 1976 to 1979 Llosa served as President of PEN. His deep commitment to free expression is frequently reflected in the politically charged nature of his books, which have aroused the anger of the right and the left wing alike.

A man of diverse interests, he is a playwright and his critical studies of Garcia Marquez, Flaubert, Sartre and Camus are internationally respected. He has also produced and hosted 'The Tower of Babel', the Peruvian television show that looks at every aspect of Latin American culture from Borges to boxing. A football fanatic, he covered the 1982 World Cup for Peru.

In 1983 he presided over the commission which investigated the deaths of eight journalists, killed in Ayacucho during the Belaunde Government's campaign against the Maoist guerrila movement, the Sendero Luminoso. Having once declined the Prime Ministership of Peru in 1984, he was a candidate in the 1990 Presidential elections.

Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award in March 1985 for The War of the End of the World and the Neil Gunn International Fellowship in 1986. In 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.