Since it was founded in 2020, the Litfest International Online Fiction Book Club has discussed more than 70 books with their authors, translators, editors and critics. Gerald Martin, Latin American expert and biographer of both Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, joins us once again to lead our discussion of one of the Peruvian novelist’s most popular novels – Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

Set in Peru during the 1950s, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is the story of an 18-year-old student who falls for a 32-year-old divorcee. Mario, an aspiring writer, works at a radio station that broadcasts, live each day, up to a half-dozen short-run soap operas. At the same time that the author meets his ‘Aunt Julia’, the radio station hires a Bolivian scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho to write the serials. The novel chronicles the scriptwriter's rise and fall in tandem with the protagonist's affair.

Litfest International Fiction Online Book Club: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter