 A
nameless, timeless South American country slowly emerges from a
war everyone would prefer to forget. For ten years, Norma has been
the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence, while
hiding her own personal loss: her husband disappeared at the end
of the war. Norma’s radio program is the most popular in the
country, and every week the Indians in the mountains and poor of
the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone
missing, those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed.
Loved ones are reunited, and the lost are found.
But the life she has become accustomed to is
forever changed when a young boy arrives from the jungle and provides
a clue to the fate of her long-missing husband.
Stunning, timely, and absolutely mesmerizing,
Lost City Radio probes the deepest questions of war and
its meaning: from its devastating impact on a society transformed
by violence to the emotional scarring each participant, observer,
and survivor carries with them for years.
>
Read reviews of Lost City Radio
"Daniel Alarcon writes about subterfuge, lies,
and the arbitrary recreation of history with a masterful clarity.
By accepting the premise that war is senseless, he goes on to make
sense of the lives that are destroyed in its wake. Lost City
Radio is both ambitious and resonant."
—Ann Patchett, author of Bel
Canto
"Daniel Alarcón has a gift for writing
about communities as a whole that is rare in U.S.fiction.
This beautiful book reveals a city that, though nameless, crackles
with sorrow and with life."
—Nell Freudenberger, author of The
Dissident
“Lost City Radio is a gripping and
tense political fable, sharply rooted in a world we have to come
to recognize. With echoes of Orwell and Huxley, and with images
of astonishing originality, Daniel Alarcón creates a universe
both menacing and tender, filled with characters imagined with skill
and nuance. The book has the same attention to detail and unflinching
eye as Alarcón’s collection of stories, War by
Candlelight. The scope of the narrative and the sense of urgency
in the story make clear that he is one of the most exciting and
ambitious writers to emerge in recent years.”
—Colm Toíbín, author
of The Master
“Daniel Alarcón has written a book that
fully captures the slow, quiet terror of war. From the first page,
the reader, like Alarcón's characters, is captured by an
uncertainty and longing that makes it impossible to leave this story
alone. Alarcon's prose is quick and beautiful. This is a first novel
that needs to be read. “
—Uzodinma Iweala, author of Beasts
of No Nation
The Independent [36
K pdf]
May 17, 2007
"A formidably accomplished first novel. Alarcón's nameless country
feels as intensely real as the riotous flora of its rainforests or the reeking
slums of its cities... [He] surveys this "postconflict" landscape in
a style that weds gravity to grace."
New Statesman [104
K pdf]
May 7, 2007
"Powerful. Alarcón is at his best in evoking the unforgettable
setting. Mixing elements of Márquez and Orwell, he creates a nightmare
landscape of roadblocks, abductions and unexplained imprisonment...Anyone who
thinks this describes Buenos Aires in 1973 better than it does Baghdad in 2007
simply isn't paying attention."
The
Guardian (UK) [116 K pdf]
April 14, 2007
"Lost City Radio is a book of extraordinary power... [Alarcón's]
endless invention and sense of colour are already second to none."
Chicago
Tribune [1.3 MB pdf]
April 1, 2007
"[A] powerful, disquieting novel... [Alarcón] sees no heroes
here, not the rebels nor the soldiers nor the government. Instead, he uses
his considerable literary gifts for a merciless meditation on the selfishness
of both sides and the victims they left behind."
Contra Costa
Times [32 K pdf]
April 1, 2007
"Remarkable... Alarcón's writing is masterful, and as enriching
as it is stark"
The
New York Times Book Review [296 K pdf]
March 25, 2007
"[Lost City Radio] has the same vigor that made Alarcón's
debut collection War by Candlelight such a delight. Alarcón
is talented--and wise--beyond his years."
Hispanic
Magazine [28 K pdf]
March 2007
"A masterful display of sustained tone and mood. Alarcón [has] the
uncommon maturity and necessarily cold eye of an emerging master..."
Cleveland
Plain-Dealer [80 K pdf]
March 3, 2007
"Daniel Alarcón writes with a poet's heart and a reporter's skill...
[He] describes with beautiful, succinct prose how opposing sensibilities
- loyalty and treachery, tenderness and brutality - can co-exist in the same
body, the same place, like dandelions poking through chunks of broken asphalt."
KQED San Francisco
February 27, 2007
"A book so insanely good that I've been forcing it on everyone I know... Alarcón
is the real deal."
Daniel Olivas,
El Paso Times [44K pdf]
February 25, 2007
“Lost City Radio is, quite simply, a triumph. Alarcón has
created a sublimely terrifying, war-ravaged world populated by unforgettable
and fully realized characters. But at the novel's core is a story of hope, one
that renders the resiliency of human nature in all its imperfect glory.”
John Freeman, The Philadelphia Inquirer [48
K pdf]
February 25, 2007
“We emerge from this impressive political fable with a profound sense of
loss and rage, and a clarifying glimpse into the futility of violence.”
Eugene
Weekly
February 23, 2007
"Brilliant and disturbing... Alarcón never neglects the telling details.
The plot moves through past and present, recursively visiting topics and moments
that turn into touchstones for the horrors of war."
TimeOut New York [48 K pdf]
February 22, 2007
“[A] sumptuous debut novel… Alarcón evokes not just the immediate
horrors of war but the daily mysteries and confusion that battles inspire.”
Williamette Week [52 K pdf]
February 21, 2007
"An ambitious, well-crafted first novel...Through compassionately rendered
characters and gorgeous, flowing prose, Alarcón tells an important story
about the devastating and fragmenting effects of civil war on a society, on individuals,
and on families."
The Boston Globe
February 19, 2007
“A beautifully written tale of love and loss.”
The Tennessean [44
K pdf]
February 17, 2007
“Lost City Radio is poetic without being pretentious, serious
and affecting without being ponderous, carefully constructed without being
precious… [It] feels like the product of a mature talent, and Alarcón
likely will draw comparisons to such luminaries as Nadine Gordimer or Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, who write with similar authority and scope of the borderless
zones where personal and political realms meet and intertwine.”
Book
Reporter
February 16, 2007
"Alarcón's prose is elliptical and dreamlike, aptly suited to the
mysterious spell he weaves in Lost City Radio. It's a novel that whispers,
rather than shouts, for our attention, and it's all the more powerful and moving
for that fact."
TimeOut
Chicago [52 K pdf]
February 14, 2007
“Alarcón has earned some weighty comparisons since his debut in The
New Yorker a few years ago, but the one that resonates most for us, at
least, is the one made to Graham Greene. Both writers share an honest but unflinching
sympathy for their characters, but more to the point, modulate effortlessly
between the cultural and the individual scales in a way that is, in a word,
cosmic.”
The Christian
Science Monitor [52 K pdf]
February 13, 2007
“[A] haunting debut novel. Lost City Radio is a wrenching commentary
on the devastation war can inflict. But the mystery at the heart of this story
is not political – it's a riddle of the human heart.”
The San Francisco
Chronicle [32 K pdf]
February 11, 2007
“[A] shadowy and brilliant first novel… I was lost in the wonderfully
imagined world of Lost City Radio.”
The
Los Angeles Times [1.8 MB pdf]
February 4, 2007
“Remarkable. Few first-time novelists skillfully pursue so
many separate intentions — history, mystery, cautionary tale
— or manage to coordinate their simultaneous unfolding. "Lost
City Radio" is a bravura performance.”
Minneapolis
Star-Tribune [28 K pdf]
February 4, 2007
“Big ideas broached from unexpected angles, an apprehension
of the human condition and every sentence constructed like a Stradivarius…
reading Alarcón feels like witnessing the arrival of a John
Steinbeck or Gabriel García Márquez.”
Jonathan
Yardley, Washington Post Book World [1 MB pdf]
January 28, 2007
"[Alarcón's] words express, eloquently and exactly,
the self-destructiveness of violent insurgency and official retaliation. Lost
City Radio is a fable for an entire continent, and is
no less pertinent in other parts of the world where different languages
are spoken in different climates but where the same ruinous dance
is played out."
Booklist
[3 MB pdf]
February 2007
“A debut novel that is a marvel of concision and soulfulness...
Writing rapturously and elegiacally of the wildness of both the
jungle and the city, Alarcón reaches to the heart of our
persistent if elusive dream of freedom and peace.”
John Leonard, Harper's
February 2007
“Eerie.. Joan Didion in Graham Greeneland, or J.M. Coetzee
meets Amoz Oz, as if politics devoured privacy on its way to abstractions
as shiny as the guillotine.”
Elle Magazine [72
K pdf]
February 2007
“Alarcón has created a chilling, intimate, powerfully
atmospheric tale of the moral, psychological, and emotional casualties
of war.”
Library Journal
[20 K pdf]
December 2006
“Like Orwell, Alarcón poses difficult social questions
that often go unvoiced, rendering his insights in beautiful, painstakingly
precise language. Literature is fortunate to have such a promising,
thought-provoking young writer.”
Kirkus
Review [64 K pdf]
November 15, 2006
“A jarring and deeply imagined first novel that feels at once
anonymous and very familiar... Alarcón has mapped a whole
nation and given its war-torn history real depth--an impressive
feat.” (starred review) |
