Harsh Times

THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE



"A wildly enjoyable book; the 85-year-old Vargas Llosa is as sharp and mordantly funny as ever." Financial Times





Guatemala, 1954. A CIA-supported military coup topples the government. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changed the development of Latin America: that those in power encouraged the spread of Soviet communism in the Americas.





Mario Vargas Llosa has written a drama on a world stage, in which some persecutors end up as victims of the very plot they helped construct. Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, 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.



Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. He also won the Cervantes Prize, the most distinguished literary honour in the Spanish-speaking world. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, The Bad Girl and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter as well as several collections of essays, journalism and plays. He died in April 2025.



Adrian Nathan West is a novelist, essayist, and 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.



The new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning master of fiction - the true story of Guatemala's political turmoil of the 1950s.