In Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life, Gerald Martin presents the late Peruvian-born author as a compellingly contradictory figure - at once as the admirable, dashing, brilliant enfant terrible of the Latin American Boom, who went on to become a grand old man of Western letters, and a Nobel laureate - but also as someone reprehensible, a man deeply self-centred and vainglorious, ideologically disingenuous, and a pathological deceiver of those closest to him. A truly fascinating and engrossing read

JON LEE ANDERSON

Always compulsive…I was a friend of Vargas Llosa for 40 years… but reading Martin's extraordinary portrait I realise how little I knew him

Nicholas Shakespeare, SPECTATOR

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

Pratinav Anil, GUARDIAN

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

Ian Thomson, LITERARY REVIEW

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

Maya Jaggi, NEW STATESMAN

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

Boyd Tonkin, FINANCIAL TIMES