At Night We Walk in Circles

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FINALIST FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE

A breathtaking, suspenseful search for the truth of one mans spectacular downfall, from Daniel Alarcn, one of the New Yorkers 20 best writers under 40.
Set in an unnamed South American country, a narrator we know little about pieces together the story from journals, interviews, gossip, second-hand reports of a young man called Nelson who travels through the mountains with a playwright and a motley collection of actors, performing a play that years earlier upset the authorities and had the playwright imprisoned. Nelson regrets leaving Ixta his girlfriend, who has since become pregnant with another man, the consequences of which will in the end overwhelm Nelson.

The travelling troupe eventually come to T______, home to the senile mother of the male lover of the playwright, who has since perished in prison. When Nelson, out of sympathy, impersonates the mothers dead son, chaos ensues as the two strands of the story are bound together.

Reviews

Alarcn is a serious, talented, charming and often beautiful writer Guardian

Daniel Alarcn is a serious talent At Night We Walk in Circles is a complex exploration of memory, storytelling, fate and identity Alarcn 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

Alarcons 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 Alarcns 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 Alarcn'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

Author Bio

Daniel Alarcon 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.