This Country Is No Longer Yours

In Avik Jain Chatlani's This Country Is No Longer Yours, a chorus of disparate voices comes together to explore how idealists and opportunists betray ordinary people in war-torn Peru.

One of our dead writers liked to say, "Peru is a beggar sleeping on a bench made of gold." It's a cute phrase, but it's not really true. There's hardly any gold left, and none of us get much sleep.

Based on real events in 1970s–2000s Peru, This Country Is No Longer Yours tells the story of Peruvians living through a wildly turbulent time of revolution and counter-revolution, while struggling to survive somewhere in-between.

A wealthy student of the revolution's leader is sent to Cambodia to learn from the Khmer Rouge, sending him spiralling into a world of unfathomable political violence that both inspires him and will be his undoing; a brutal government agent of the newly elected neoconservative government works to squash the growing insurgency now threatening the halls of power, while applying his surveillance training to romantic pursuits—with chilling results; a journalist committed to exposing a brewing nationalist counter-revolution is too preoccupied to help a reader desperately pleading for help outing a high-profile predator seeking the country's highest political office; two former revolutionaries and ex-lovers meet years later, one now successful but stuck in the past, the other living on the fringes and still fighting for her future.

Depicting a place and time ravaged by terror but alive with new ambitions and enduring love, Chatlani explores the intersection of political breakdown and human spirit, and the impossible, fatally imperfect choices demanded of those living in a society at war with itself. With incisive and crystalline prose, combined with deeply personal insight, Chatlani offers a stinging indictment of the political isms that so often victimize the very people they claim to represent, and relays an urgent warning about the dangers of ideological zealotry, political messianism and acts of violence justified in the name of a cause.