The Bad Girl - Mario Vargas Llosa

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager in Lima in 1950, and next in Paris, where she appears as the enchanting Comrade Arlette. In Llosa's beguiling novel, the strange bedfellows of good and bad turn out not to be what they appear.

n nA New York Times Notable Book of 2007 n nFrom 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 n nRicardo 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.n