The Bad Girl: A Novel

A New York TimesNotable 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.