Jeremías Gamboa

A thirty-three-year-old man returns to his home country, Peru, feeling like a castaway: he has no partner, no friends, no money, no job, and not the slightest idea of where to steer his life. All he has managed to do is take refuge in his mother’s house in the neighborhood of his childhood—a place he once left swearing he would never return.

This return becomes a journey through the lights and shadows of memory. The reappearance of a friend from the past—and with him, the teacher who taught them to read and write—triggers a whirlwind of painful revelations that gradually untie the knot within him: ghosts of his origins, the terror of the country he grew up in, the hardships of public school, and beyond that, the suffering of rural Andean life and the harsh discovery of social and racial inequality.

El principio del mundo (The Beginning of the World) is a wounded treatise on personal and family memory, a brutal X-ray of the Peruvian century, but also a moving tribute to the vital work of teachers and a desperate, furious love letter to a mother.

With this ambitious and complex novel, Jeremías Gamboa expands his literary universe and pays extraordinary homage to the novel as a tool for naming reality.

El principio del mundo tells the story of a man returning to his childhood home in Lima after a period of personal crisis. In that homecoming—marked by uprootedness and uncertainty—painful memories resurface: the fragility of the public education system, structural violence, and a mother’s unconditional love. The novel is a tribute to teachers, a critical portrait of contemporary Peru, and an intimate exploration of origins, wounds, and identity.

“In The Beginning of the World, memory is a labyrinth that Gamboa explores with the beams of lucidity and emotion. An unforgettable novel about the empires of the past in our lives.” Alonso Cueto

“A beautiful meditation on memory and the passage of time, written with emotion at the surface and, at the same time, with something I can only call wisdom. Gamboa is a novelist of rare sensitivity.” Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Un estudiante llega a una universidad de Colorado, en los Estados Unidos, en busca del sueño americano en su versión académica. La promesa del campus como un santuario en cuyas fronteras se han resuelto los problemas de Occidente -origen, raza, clase- sucumbe ante la realidad nocturna: los alumnos deambulan por los extramuros de la ciudad, a la caza de todo aquello que el día les niega: luz, compañía, ternura, certezas.

La mirada del protagonista explora las historias que se enhebran durante una noche interminable: la obsesión por Sudamérica como destino romántico, sexual y político; los amores paralelos y tóxicos; la necesidad de borrar las señas de identidad para crear otras nuevas; la literatura como resguardo; el futuro en la forma de una oscuridad apenas iluminada por algunas estrellas lejanas y ajenas.

"Estamos ante una historia perfectamente construida y condensada en una sola noche que todo lo dice y todo lo resume. Una novela de amor con un hermoso final, con un principio inquietante y con una técnica narrativa impecable que se mantiene sin titubeos de principio a fin". Héctor Abad Faciolince

"Un escritor perfectamente dueño de sus medios expresivos, que sabe concentrarse en lo esencial, que es siempre contar una historia bien contada". Mario Vargas Llosa

"En la noche oscura del alma tiene que haber una luz. Gamboa la encuentra con el ritmo y la lengua, la complejidad y la gracia, la trama veloz y la reflexión. Se mete en una grieta íntima y la construye universal. Animales luminosos es una novela hermosa". Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

"El autor de Animales luminosos redobla su apuesta desde la fuerza de una narración que parecería "una bola de fuego" y que deja en el cuerpo abrumadoras sensaciones de rabia, impotencia y desamparo. Una novela estupenda trabajada en el centro del estilo y que avizora que el reconocimiento del pasado es lo que hace posible el futuro". Emiliano Monge, El País

"Vargas Llosa lo avaló entonces como una gran promesa de las letras de su país y de la lengua española, y ahora ya parece que ese destino, ser de los grandes autores hispanoamericanos, tiene el acuerdo de todos". Juan Cruz, El Periódico

"Tanto Contarlo todo como Animales luminosos son, por encima de todo, trabajos de orfebre, de artista que se mete en más problemas de lo que su solvencia narrativa le exigiría. Gamboa no solo hace lo que podría escribir en piloto automático, sino que fuerza las formas, probándose en todo momento a sí mismo". Carlos Zanón, Babelia

"Escrita con un pulso latente que va desvelando una trama oculta y nocturna a cada paso, Animales luminosos es una auténtica novela breve, impecable en su ejecución, que demuestra que el talento de Jeremías Gamboa para este género no solamente permanece intacto, sino que ha dado, también, uno de sus mejores frutos". Diego Gándara, La Razón

One morning in September 2004, in a modest room in Santa Anita—a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Lima—a young Peruvian man who has had nothing in life but his own story sits down to write his first novel, fully convinced he is already a writer. His name is Gabriel Lisboa, and what emerges from his hands is Contarlo todo: a raw and epic narrative that begins with a teenager trembling as he “strings words together” in a newsroom in downtown Lima, and ends with that same boy, now a man, writing with extraordinary urgency and resolve the great story of his life.

A manual of youth, friendship, and love, Contarlo todo is above all a great coming-of-age novel—a moving account of how to find one’s place in the world and build a personal identity, of the role played by those who share our dreams, and of the drive and fear that come with writing. Above all, it reveals the blinding, utterly transformative, and magical power of literature.

“A writer perfectly in control of his expressive means, who knows how to focus on what truly matters: telling a well-told story.” Mario Vargas Llosa

“Forget literary damnation—what matters to Jeremías Gamboa is a kind of literature that offers light at the end of the tunnel.” Amelia Castilla, Babelia

“If he succeeds, everyone will know what the ‘mostros’ are.” Xavi Ayén, La Vanguardia

In March 2016, as part of their "América Latina Olé Tour," the British band The Rolling Stones performed in Cuba for the first time, in a free concert held at Havana’s Ciudad Deportiva. On Good Friday, just after the visit of U.S. President Barack Obama—the first American head of state to set foot in Cuba in eighty-eight years—the Stones played before a crowd whose exact size remains a topic of debate: was it 500,000 people? 1.2 million?

The audience included fans from abroad who didn’t want to miss what promised to be one of the band’s most thrilling shows, as well as actors, journalists, and of course Cubans who, for the most part—due to restrictions imposed by the Castro regime—had never heard the Rolling Stones’ music before.

Argentinian journalist Javier Sinay, Mexican writer and Café Tacvba guitarist Joselo, and Peruvian writer and journalist Jeremías Gamboa traveled to Cuba to witness this strange experiment: a head-on collision between the world’s longest-running rock band and a people only just beginning to awaken to their music.

This book brings together the chronicles they each wrote about that concert, which became a historic event.

Endearing and sometimes obsessive young people who suffer from belonging to a place that feels strange to them and from a pressing sense of alienation—these are the characters in these stories. They move between illusion, nostalgia, disconnection, anxiety, and helplessness, and they are deeply moving in their urgent desire to escape. To run away.

In this book, Gamboa gives shape to the multifaceted face of Lima—a city that is at once jarring and profound, grotesque and playful, nocturnal and radiant; a space where everything seems possible. The result is a collection of unforgettable stories, a debut work of fiction in which some of the author’s fundamental themes are already present: friendship, the need for self-affirmation, the urgency to connect with others, and the discovery of the world.