Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

'Without doubt a magnificent novel - comic, imaginative . . . written with a feeling for the language that is quite remarkable.' -- Daily Telegraph

'A comic novel on the grand scale, written with tremendous confidence and verve . . . Llosa's huge energy and inventiveness is extravagant and fabulously funny.' --New Statesman

'This novel is as full of fizz as a giant pack of sherbet, witty, wise and wonderful in equal proportions.' -- Sunday Times

'A novel of immense vitality and imagination.' --Literary Review

'A comic novel that is genuinely funny . . . [and] never ceases to entertain.' --New York Times

Set in Peru during the 1950s, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is the story of an 18 year old student who falls for a 32 year old divorcee. Mario, an aspiring writer, works at a radio station that broadcasts, live each day, up to a half-dozen short-run soap operas. At the same time that the author meets his "Aunt Julia", the radio station, which had been buying scripts by weight from Cuba, hires a Bolivian scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho to write the serials. The novel chronicles the scriptwriter's rise and fall in tandem with the protagonist's affair.