Lost City Radio
SynopsisPlot
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 decade-long 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.
Story
About this book
In an unnamed South American country shaped by a decade of civil war, a radio host named Norma reads the names of missing people on the airwaves each week. Her program, Lost City Radio, has become a lifeline for communities scattered by conflict. Listeners from mountain villages and overcrowded urban barrios tune in hoping to hear news of relatives who vanished during the fighting or were absorbed into the rapidly growing capital city. Through the show, separated families sometimes find each other again.
Norma carries her own private loss. Her husband disappeared near the end of the war, and she has spent years broadcasting consolation to others while concealing that grief. Her carefully maintained routine fractures when a boy arrives from the jungle carrying a list of names and a connection to her husband's fate. The story follows three lives pulled apart by violence and asks how people rebuild when the structures around them have been destroyed.
Daniel Alarcon's debut novel is set in a place that echoes Peru and other Latin American countries marked by internal armed conflicts. The narrative moves between the capital, the jungle, and the highlands, tracing how war reshapes geography, language, and personal identity long after the fighting ends.
