From the author of the internationally acclaimed Santa Evita comes a dazzling fictional portrait of Juan Peron, the most revered -- and hated -- dictator in the history of Argentina. Following the ailing general from his return to his homeland after eighteen years of exile to his death scarcely a year later, Tomas Eloy Martinez has created a novel whose fantasy only heightens its humanity. For in The Peron Novel the mask of history is lifted to reveal a tragically hollow man who was born a follower until the moment he found himself transformed into a leader. The result is a tour de force, the most audacious and compelling meditation on absolute power since Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch.