Presenting a collection of the writings of Mario Vargas Llosa, this book takes a journey through time, through books, and through different geographical locations, plotting the intellectual biography of one of Latin America's most important novelists. It follows Vargas Llosa from Peru to France, where he writes on Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Camus, visits the dog cemetery which contains the tomb of Rin Tin Tin, and describes the life of the aspirant writer in the Paris of the 1960s. In Britain he examines the writings of Doris Lessing and Salman Rushdie, the house where Karl Marx lived, and - in an hilarious and celebrated memoir - considers the transformation of his own son, Gonzalo, into a Rastafarian.