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