Gordon Lish’s masterpiece, a story of the violence and horror beneath the facade of ordinary American life. 

Peru begins with its narrator announcing, "There is nothing which I will not tell you if I can think of it." Gradually, the story of a dark childhood secret unfolds: in 1940, six-year-old Gordon murdered his harelipped rival, Steven Adinoff, in a Long Island sandbox... unless he didn't. Seeking the truth behind this gruesome memory, Peru's narrator weaves together strands of disconnected, mesmerizing trivia, resurrecting Proustian details from the mundane suburban childhood that may (or may not) have spawned a killing: the sense of heaviness and tedium on an endless summer day; the squishy sounds of a hoe digging into flesh. Ambiguous, complex, inventive, and subversively comic, Peru is a compendium of observations about memory, violence, obsession, and horror.