Alfredo Bryce Echenique

Julius was born in a mansion on Salaverry Avenue, directly across from the old San Felipe Hippodrome. Life-size Disney characters and cowboy movie heroes romp across the walls of his nursery. Out in the carriage house, his great-grandfather's ornate, moldering carriage takes him on imaginary adventures. But Julius's father is dead, and his beautiful young mother passes through her children's lives like an ephemeral shooting star. Despite the soft shelter of family and money, hard realities overshadow Julius's expanding world, just as the rugged Andes loom over his home in Lima. This lyrical, richly textured novel, first published in 1970 as Un mundo para Julius, opens new territory in Latin American literature with its focus on the social elite of Peru. A member of that elite, Bryce Echenique incisively charts the decline of an influential, centuries-old aristocratic family who becomes nouveaux riches with the invasion of foreign capital in the 1950s.

“With this novel Bryce Echenique enters the arena in grand style, with a very sharp sword and a heart as big as Peru.” Pablo Neruda

“Thanks to the intelligence of its craftmanship, the science of its language, the subtle mixture of irony, nostalgia, humour and tenderness, and the razor-sharp view of reality that make up its essence, this book by Bryce Echenique is one of the best novels ever written by a Latin American author.” Gabriel García Marquez

“Un mundo para Julius is one of the funniest and subtlest novels in Latin American literature. In it, Alfredo Bryce Echenique describes, with the sensitivity of a child, the refined but unseeing world of the oligarchies. The criticism runs deep but it is softened by delightful humor, discreet tenderness and gentle nostalgia.” Mario Vargas Llosa

 “A masterpiece of Latin American narrative. Alfredo Bryce Echenique was called “the best writer in Peru’ by the well-known translator Gregory Rabassa.” Robert Houston, The New York Times Book Review

“The Proust of Peruvian society.” Angela Bianchini