The Peruvian novelist is the 2010 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. This is actually a really good choice, and it completely stymies everybody who was making odds on the Nobel Prize, which is satisfying.

If you want to try a good Vargas Llosa novel, try The Storyteller (it's an awful cover, I know.) His 2002 novel Feast of the Goat, too, is a great book about politics and ambition and the end of an awful dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1961.