Martin follows up his 2008 biography of Gabriel García Márquez with a prodigious yet approachable study of the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa...definitive and exhilarating.

Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

An authoritative biography of MarioVargasLlosa, the first to appear in English since the Peruvian Nobel laureate's death in 2025, strives to reconcile contradictions and explain pivots ...The resulting portrait, 15 years in researching and writing, is a thoughtful, frequently critical appraisal of a rare and intense talent.

Booklist (Starred Review)

This chatty yet coolly analytical biography… traces the path of a novelist who began by dissecting oligarchy with surgical precision and ended happily dining among its ranks. Martin has written a genuinely critical life… a searching, stylish account whose real subject is not merely Vargas Llosa but the intellectual and political milieux that made and unmade him.

The Guardian

A towering monument to dashed hopes and bitter disappointments… Think of it as a sprawling non-fiction novel, but scrupulously accurate: an incendiary epic, on both sides, of illusions cherished and paradise mislaid

Financial Times

Forensic… Martin's irreverent, myth-busting, at times barbed biography inspects the largely un-self-examined relationship between the novelist's politics and his writing.

The New Statesman

Immaculately sourced… A riveting account… Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life remains a considerable achievement: gossipy, erudite and deeply researched, it will be the last word on the man who wanted to be the most famous writer in the Hispanic world since Cervantes

Literary Review