"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
