Master of political intrigue and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa crafts a thriller of extortion and revenge on Peru's northern coast.
Make a list of the crises, twists, and catastrophes that drive The Discreet Hero, the assured and engrossing 16th novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, and it sounds like a dime-store potboiler. But we're talking Vargas Llosa here, the Nobel laureate whose own life "â?? journalist, activist, onetime presidential candidate in his native Peru "â?? has been anything but tame. If anyone can take extortion, arson, adultery, and mysticism and turn out literary fiction, it's the guy who first revered novelist Gabriel García Márquez and then clocked him in a public fistfight, leaving his literary hero with a black eye.
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