Lost City Radio: Book summary and reviews of Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

Lost City Radio Summary

For ten years, Norma has been the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence. She hosts Lost City Radio, the most popular program in their nameless South American country, gripped in the aftermath of war. Every week, the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone missing, those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Loved ones are reunited and the lost are found. Each week, she returns to the airwaves while hiding her own personal loss: her husband disappeared at the end of the war.

But the life she has become accustomed to is forever changed when a young boy arrives from the jungle and provides a clue to the fate of her long-missing husband.

Lost City Radio Reviews

Though the mystery Alarcón makes of the identity of Victor's father isn't particularly mysterious, this misstep is overshadowed by her successful and nimbly handled portrayal of war's lingering consequences." - PW.
"Starred Review. Writing rapturously and elegiacally of the wildness in both jungle and city, creating indelible images that concentrate the horrors of war, and unerringly articulating the complex feelings of individuals caught in barbaric and senseless predicaments, Alarcon reaches to the heart of our persistent if elusive dream of freedom and peace." - Booklist.

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Daniel Alarcon Author Biography

Daniel Alarcón is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning magazine published in his native Lima, Peru, and Visting Scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley. He is author of two works of fiction, War by Candlelight (2006 PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist) and Lost City Radio, a novel published in more than a dozen countries. He has won numerous prizes, including a Whiting Award (2004), Guggenheim and Lannan Fellowships (2007), and a National Magazine Award (2008). In June 2010, he was named one of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of fiction writers worth watching.