For ten years, Norma has been the on-air voice of consolation and hope for the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios — a people broken by war's violence. As the host of Lost City Radio, she reads the names of those who have disappeared — those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Through her efforts lovers are reunited and the lost are found. But in the aftermath of the decadelong bloody civil conflict, her own life is about to forever change — thanks to the arrival of a young boy from the jungle who provides a cryptic clue to the fate of Norma's vanished husband

Something is happening. Wars, both national and internal, are being waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, in the intimacy of New York apartments. War by Candlelight is an exquisite collection of stories that carry the reader from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and people — a devastating portrait of a world in flux — and Daniel Alarcón is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget