At Night We Walk in Circles

Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, Peru, in 1977 and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. His collection of short stories, ‘War By Candlelight’, was published in 2005 to great acclaim, and was followed by a novel, ‘Lost City Radio’, in 2007. His writing has appeared in ‘McSweeney’s’, ‘n+1’, and ‘Harper’s’, and he has been named one of the 20 best writers under 40 by the ‘New Yorker. He lives in Oakland, California. ‘At Night We Walk in Circles’ is his second novel.

‘Alarcón is a serious, talented, charming and often beautiful writer’ Guardian‘Daniel Alarcón is a serious talent … ‘At Night We Walk in Circles’ is a complex exploration of memory, storytelling, fate and identity … Alarcón summons both the city and the provinces of his native land with tremendous vigour and reveals the loneliness that lies at the heart of his characters’ Financial Times‘Comedy and menace are held in exquisite tension … beautifully plotted and paced … This is a clever book, not a clever-clever one, with a metafictional dimension that raises the emotional temperature rather than cooling it. As a heartwarming road novel, a pair of doomed love stories and a propulsive, irresolvable murder mystery folded into a scrupulous inspection of narrative ethics, it's some feat’ Guardian‘Alarcon’s conscious reimagining emancipates him from writing a kind of fictionalised anthropology. It allows him to write a fable for any small country ravaged by the Cold War, by the drug trade, by violent political factionalism, and by the displacement of traditional societies through neoliberal economic policies.’ Telegraph‘The novel succeeds as a powerful elegy for a vanishing world and captures the dying light of a radical moment.’ Ted Hodgkinson, Literary Review‘Poignantly vivid … Alarcón’s depiction of the twin traps of illusion and despair, his portraits of people defeated by life or refusing to accept defeat, ring powerfully true’ Prospect‘Nabokov says that imagination is a form of memory, and this novel is a perfect example of this claim. In writing about a place, its people and its history, Daniel Alarcón's memory catches the evanescent details of everyday life, while his imagination, never for a moment blurred, creates a powerful story with so many intricate characters. This is a novel written with extraordinary vision and wisdom.’ Yiyun Li, author of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and The Vagrants