The Tour Guide

The Tour Guide is a quietly powerful literary novel rooted in truth, based on a true story of survival, silence, and succession in postcolonial Peru.

A story of deception, reckoning, death, reunion, 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 hacienda 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.

Set against the real-life devastation of the 1970 Ancash earthquake and avalanche, the novel follows Santiago, a Peruvian orphan raised in a shadow of secrets he doesn't know he carries, as he searches for meaning, belonging, and the thread of identity across continents and decades.

What unfolds is a different kind of inheritance. A path that leads to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The tour guide recounts his tale not as memory, but as something more ominous. It has waited. It is coming.

At once intimate and sweeping, The Tour Guide is a literary work of emotional archaeology. This incredible journey was casually shared with the author in a quiet café, entrusted across time and memory, and shaped into a work meant to endure.