Bad Girl

by Mario Vargas Llosa (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $4.92

  Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as 'Lily' in LIma in 1950, when she arrives one summer out of the blue, claiming to be from Chile but vanishing the moment her claim is exposed as fiction. He loves her next in Paris, where she appears as teh enchanting 'Comrade Arlette', an activist en route to Cuba, and becomes his lover, albeit an icty, remote one who denies knowing anything about the Lily of years gone by. Whoever the bad girl turns up as - whether it's Madame Robert Arnoux, the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official, or Kuriko, the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman - and however poorly she treats him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her. Gifted liar and irresistible, maddening muse - does Ricardo ever know who she really is? The answer is as unclear as what has become of Ricardo himself, a lifelong expatriate shadowed by the sense that he is only ever drifting. In Mario Vargas Llosa's beguiling new novel, the strange bedfellows of good and bad turn out not to be what they appear.

• New

  Paperback
  2008

  $12.81

  When the beautiful teenage Lily arrives in Lima in 1950, fifteen-year-old Ricardo falls instantly in love with her. She claims to be from Chile, but vanishes the moment it becomes clear that she has lied about both her name and her nationality. A decade later, now living in Paris, Ricardo falls in love with a woman named Comrade Arlette, who is incredibly similar to Lily but refuses to acknowledge that she is the same person. For his whole life, Ricardo seems doomed to keep running into 'Lily', and to keep falling in love with her. Will he ever discover who she really is?