A novel based on a true story of survival, silence, and succession in postcolonial Peru. Set against the real-life devastation of the 1970 Ancash earthquake and avalanche, The Tour Guide is a novel of reunion, reckoning, deception, death, and the unbearable weight of what a single life can contain.

A child is born in secret, his presence unacknowledged, his origin obscured by silence. Those with power conceal what they do not want to answer for.

Those without it learn to speak without words. Yet, from the convent corridors of Yungay to the highest home on the hill, decisions are made without them. A girl is hidden. A baby disappears. No one signs a ledger. No one asks the right questions.

What unfolds is a different kind of inheritance. A path that leads to a foreign city. A past narrated by a tour guide, while the truth of his own remains just out of reach. What he carries is not memory, but something more ominous. It has waited. It is coming.

At once intimate and sweeping, The Tour Guide is a work of emotional archaeology: literary fiction grounded in true testimony, told without flourish or apology.