Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa
Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

Harsh Times
A Novel

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa, Adrian Nathan West

Narrator: Ian Guerra

Unabridged: 10 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/23/2021


Synopsis

The true story of Guatemala’s political turmoil of the 1950s as only a master of fiction can tell it

Guatemala, 1954. The military coup perpetrated by Carlos Castillo Armas and supported by the CIA topples the government of Jacobo Árbenz. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changes the development of Latin America: the accusation by the Eisenhower administration that Árbenz encouraged the spread of Soviet Communism in the Americas. Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.

In this thrilling novel, Mario Vargas Llosa fuses reality with two fictions: that of the narrator, who freely re-creates characters and situations, and the one designed by those who would control the politics and the economy of a continent by manipulating its history.

Harsh Times is a gripping, revealing novel that directly confronts recent history. No one is better suited to tell this riveting story than Vargas Llosa, and there is no form better for it than his deeply textured fiction. Not since The Feast of the Goat, his classic novel of the downfall of Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic, has Vargas Llosa combined politics, characters, and suspense so unforgettably.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus & Giroux

About Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru in 1936. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” He also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor. His many works of fiction and nonfiction include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, all published by FSG. He died in Lima at age 89 in 2025.

About Adrian Nathan West

Adrian Nathan West is a novelist, an essayist, and a translator based in Spain. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, McSweeney’s, and more. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and a contributing editor at the translation journal Asymptote.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Loredelcarmen on October 10, 2019

Que emoción leer un libro que hable sobre la historia de mi país. Excelente investigación y la historia que va entre el libro está muy bien escrita y entretenida. Aunque me perdí al principio con los tiempos, luego ya le agarre el hilo y no podía parar de leer. Un libro que me gustó mucho.......more

Goodreads review by Ayman on June 29, 2022

.. الصخر لو ينفجر،النبع..إيه ذنبه؟! سباق في ساحة.. مابين انسان وبين قلبه.. مادام لموت..احمل السيف اللي بتحبه واذا اندفعت اندفع واذا انوجعت تسد طول عمر وطنك بيحلم تبدي حربه وجّي يا بلد الحرايق..واصرخي بجنون واحرقيها مدن وكروم وناس وسجون ملعون ابوها الحمامة ام غصن زتون معمولة لاجل الضحايا يصدقو الجلاد......more