The Mischief of the Bad Girl

Creating an admirable tension between the comical and the tragic, Nobel Prize in Literature and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, unleashes in this novel a story in which love is shown to us as indefinable, a thousand-faced owner, like the bad girl.

What is the true face of love?

Ricardo sees his dream, nurtured in his native Lima since he was a child, fulfilled at a very young age: to live in Paris. But his reunion with a teenage love will change everything. The young woman, nonconformist, adventurous, pragmatic and restless, will drag him out of the small world of his ambitions.

Witnesses to turbulent and flourishing eras in cities such as London, Paris, Tokyo or Madrid, which here are much more than mere settings, both characters will see their lives intertwine without ever fully coinciding. However, this dance of encounters and disagreements will increase the intensity of the story page by page until it leads to a true fusion of the reader with the emotional universe of the protagonists.

In The Bad Girl (2006), Mario Vargas Llosa plays with reality and fiction to illustrate the complexity of love: passion and distance, chance and destiny, pain and pleasure... What is the true face of love?

Critics have said...
"A contemporary love novel, full of eroticism, with encounters, separations, sufferings, deceptions, surrender, and also much truth, in which Vargas Llosa, like an entomologist, meticulously analyzes the human condition, much like his greatly admired Flaubert in Sentimental Education, a work cited in the novel, among many other literary references alluded to by the author. And it is that for Vargas Llosa, the idea of a novel is 'the totalizing experience of the human condition.'"
El País

"The bad girl reminds one of Sabines' lovers: they seek happiness without ever finding it, because finding it would be equivalent to losing it irrevocably. This novel is highly recommended, seemingly modest, but in reality it scratches with exquisite malice at our most intimate desires and domestic frustrations."
Javier Munguía, Revista de Letras