About the Book

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager in Lima in 1950, and next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting Comrade Arlette. In Llosa's beguiling novel, the strange bedfellows of good and bad turn out not to be what they appear.

Book Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book of 2007

From Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa comes The Bad Girl, a "...splendid, suspenseful, and irresistible [novel]. . . A contemporary love story that explores the mores of the urban 1960s--and 70s and 80s."--The New York Times Book Review

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him, he is doomed to worship her. Charting Ricardo's expatriate life through his romances with this shape-shifting woman, Vargas Llosa has created a beguiling, epic romance about the life-altering power of obsession.

Review Quotes

"Llosa writes an unabashed love story and makes no apologies for it. He seamlessly weaves it into the rich texture of the social atmosphere of the times. . . . Written with passion and energy that delivers." --Rocky Mountain News

"Perversely charming . . . irresistibly entertaining." --The Washington Post Book World

"A marvelous novel." --Chicago Tribune

"Spans decades and continents--and in the process, with a deftness that borders on literary sleight of hand, bridges the personal and the universal." --San Francisco Chronicle

"A beautifully constructed, stinging tease of a novel." --The Seattle Times

About the Author

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.