Daniel Alarcón is a brilliant new voice in literary fiction. War by Candlelight is a beautiful, vital and luminous first collection.

Something is happening around the globe: the mass movement of peoples, dislocations of language and culture in the wake of war and economic crises – simply put, our world is changing. In this exquisite collection, Daniel Alarcón takes the reader from Third World urban centres to the fault lines that divide nations and people, personalising the shifting realities of our own contemporary world.

These nine stories examine the lives of various characters in transition – from unrepentant terrorists to immigrants wrestling with the idea of never returning home – men and women never entirely free of the convulsive conditions that define their lives. Wars, both national and internal, are waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, in the intimacy of New York apartments.