War by Candlelight

Daniel Alarcon's extraordinary collection takes the reader from Third World urban centres to the fault lines that divide nations and people. In these stories an unrepentant terrorist remembers where it all began; a would-be emigrant contemplates the ramifications of leaving and never coming back; a reporter turns in his pad and pencil for the inglorious costume of a street clown. In Alarcon's haunting landscape, wars both national and internal are waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, and in the intimacy of New York apartments. These are the stories of those who live at the margins of the not-quite-globalised world - the people who never feel at home in the cities in which they were born.