At Night We Walk in Circles: A Novel Hardcover - 2013

“Wise and engaging…a provocative study of the way war culture ensnares both participant and observer, the warping fascination of violence, and the disfiguring consequences of the roles we play in public…[a] layered, gorgeously nuanced work…the ending is a quiet bomb, as satisfying as it is ambiguous.”
—New York Times Book Review

"The delicate precision, mounting tension and unfolding tragedy in this masterful book make it difficult to remember the story did not actually take place...Alarcón teaches us, in these pages, that perception and memory are relative. We see what we want to see, we believe what we want to believe. Performance can consume and distort. And time moves differently for all of us."
—Chicago Tribune

“Engaging and illuminating…an outstanding second novel from Alarcón, a work that creates a multilayered world and invites you to enter it.”
—Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

“[A] surrealistic tour de force.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine 

“Alarcón's purpose here is to disorient us, stripping away markers of place and identity, until we have to see the world on different terms.”
— David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“Alarcón is a young, talented writer who is on the cusp of a breakthrough, a state of mind perfectly captured by the compulsively energetic voice of At Night We Walk in Circles… [a] gripping story.”
—The Daily Beast

“Daniel Alarcón’s At Night We Walk in Circles is just about perfect... he skillfully weaves the past, present, and future…Alarcón [is] a man who knows what he’s doing.”
—The Coffin Factory

“There are novels that strive to imitate life, novels that sometimes succeed strikingly — even heartbreakingly — at imitating life. Then there are novels that seem to be the very stuff from which life is woven. Daniel Alarcón's third book, At Night We Walk in Circles, is an example of the latter. Alarcón's prose is seductive — detached, but also terribly intimate — and the accumulated effect of his paragraphs is a story so engrossing that it feels instantly like a classic. The book reads not like something that has been written by a talented young writer, but like something that has always been. It feels, in other words, timeless. And yet, it is timely, too. Despite an almost fable-like quality, At Night We Walk In Circles captures the rhythms of our generation and pulses with the zeitgeist of this economic moment... At Night We Walk in Circles is Alarcón's most ambitious and successful work yet — it not only lives up to the extraordinary promise of his first two books, but also promises much more to come from this wise and visionary young writer."
—PolicyMic

“Fascinating, and is a page-turner to boot.”
—The Huffington Post

“Riveting… a fast-unraveling mystery of role-playing and retribution, told in compelling prose that is smart, subtle, and totally engrossing.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Involving and dramatic…Alarcón strings the reader along expertly as he slowly complicates and shifts the perspective in this tragic tale of characters, citizens, lovers, and artists being influenced by the dangerous forces of political history and human desire.”
—Library Journal

“How Alarcón manages this layered and complex structure is one of the novel's many pleasures. The country is nameless, but the descriptions are specific and vivid…At Night We Walk in Circles is a breathtaking novel, intimate and sweeping, about the capriciousness of fate and how its ultimate brutality can come in the form of absence and longing.”
—Shelf Awareness  

“Nabokov says that imagination is a form of memory, and this novel is a perfect example of this claim. In writing about a place, its people and its history, Daniel Alarcón's memory catches the evanescent details of everyday life, while his imagination, never for a moment blurred, creates a powerful story with so many intricate characters. This is a novel written with extraordinary vision and wisdom.”
—Yiyun Li, author of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and The Vagrants

“This is a devastatingly good novel and a masterful work by a gifted storyteller. Via the tangled lives of a small group of Peruvian actors, and in clear, compelling prose, Daniel Alarcón weaves a suspenseful tale about illusion and longing, love and denial — about all the kinds of human exile.”
—Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life and The Fall of Baghdad

Praise for Daniel Alarcón

“A prodigious talent.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“One of the most exciting and ambitious writers to emerge in recent years.”
—Colm Tóibín

“Alarcón, like the best storytellers, reveals to us that the world we have secreted in our hearts spins in a bigger universe with other hearts just as good and just as bad as our own.”
—Edward P. Jones

“Reading Alarcón feels like witnessing the arrival of a John Steinbeck or Gabriel García Márquez.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune