Fiction. Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Ayacucho, Goodbye) and Alita Kelley (Moscow's Gold). When Peruvian peasant leader Alfonso Cánepa is murdered and mutilated by the police, he sets out to recover his missing bones and seek Christian burial. During the pilgrimage from his mountain village to the capital, the dead man relates an epic satire of a Peru torn apart by a decade of terrorism and government repression. Cánepa finds humor, cynicism and hope in a nation that has become "a graveyard with an airport." "Julio Ortega's two novellas display magic realism at its most effectiveas political satire"—Booklist