{"product_id":"mario-vargas-llosa-a-life","title":"Mario Vargas Llosa","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eDazzling and deeply researched, Gerald Martin provides a compelling account of the astonishing and profoundly contradictory life of Mario Vargas Llosa, a literary colossus.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e When he died in April 2025, the Peruvian novelist and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa was internationally renowned and celebrated, and \u003cb\u003ein the Spanish-speaking world unchallenged as its greatest living writer and most influential intellectual\u003c\/b\u003e. He was also indisputably the most controversial: he was never out of the headlines in more than six decades of literary and political activity, from the moment he exploded onto the cultural scene in the early 1960s with his first novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Time of the Hero\u003c\/i\u003e, until his last, \u003ci\u003eI Give You My Silence\u003c\/i\u003e, in 2023.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e At first \u003cb\u003ea declared socialist\u003c\/b\u003e, he changed his mind about the meaning of 'freedom', made the long march through the ideologies and renounced collectivism of every kind until \u003cb\u003ehe ended up as a fiery and provocative supporter of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan\u003c\/b\u003e and the neoliberal individualism they espoused.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e At nineteen he married an aunt, then replaced her with a teenage first cousin a decade later, only to abandon her in scandalous fashion after fifty years in favour of the most glamorous socialite in post-Franco Spain. He came within a whisker of the presidency of Peru, and in 2010 was \u003cb\u003eawarded the Nobel Prize\u003c\/b\u003e in Literature; but he also knocked his friend and rival \u003cb\u003eGabriel García Márquez\u003c\/b\u003e to the ground with the most famous punch in literary history. \u003cb\u003eHandsome, debonair and almost incomparably ambitious, energetic and determined,\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003eVargas Llosa's personal life was as controversial as his politics\u003c\/b\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003cu\u003ePRAISE FOR \u003ci\u003eGABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: A LIFE\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/u\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 'We already have his novels. And now, thankfully, we have this monumental work' \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 'An outstanding achievement unlikely ever to be bettered' \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eLiterary Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 'Masterful ... An astonishing feat' \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eSunday Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Unity Books","offers":[{"title":"Mario Vargas Llosa A Life","offer_id":46495530877125,"sku":null,"price":60.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0625\/6679\/3413\/files\/978-1-4088-2527-3.jpg?v=1783307420","url":"https:\/\/unitybooks.myshopify.com\/products\/mario-vargas-llosa-a-life","provider":"Unity Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}