Peru faces poll dilemma: a leftist firebrand or the dictator’s daughter?

Novelist Carlos Davalos says his homeland has an unenviable choice in bitterly divisive presidential election

Peru has always been a gloomy country; it's not the Caribbean," says the writer and journalist Carlos Davalos as the traffic rolls down the Gran Via in Madrid on a sunny June morning. There's that sense of a kind of Andean melancholy."

Although Davalos's debut novel, La Furia del Silencio (The Fury of Silence), has drawn comparisons with both The Catcher in the Rye and Alfonso Cuaron's Oscar-winning Roma, the coming-of-age tale is profoundly, and inescapably, Peruvian.