Coca's Gone examines the legacy of violence and shattered expectations that shaped the stories told by people of Peru's Upper Huallaga Valley in the aftermath of a twenty-year cocaine boom.

Funny and fanciful, this is a book about a Coca Box, and an unlikely travel foursome exploring the art and archaeology of Peru. Except that one member of the team likes to collect Precolumbian pottery. If trafficking in archaeological materials is unlawful, it seems to matter little, and in the end it appears her efforts were futile. Everything she bought was fake. Or was it? We may never know. Meantime we bounce over desert tracks along Perus North Coast, through the high canyons of the Central Andes, and across the windswept Altiplano where snow-capped volcanoes pierce the bright blue sky. An enchanting book.

In a valley in the eastern foothills of the central Peruvian Andes, a wealth of cocaine once flowed. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, this valley experienced abrupt rises in fortune, reckless corruption, and the brutality of those who sought to impress their own brand of order. When this era of cocaine came to a close, the legacy of its violence continued to mold people's perceptions of time through local storytelling practices. Coca's Gone examines the tense, depressed social terrain of Peru's Upper Huallaga Valley in the wake of a twenty-year cocaine boom. This compelling book conveys stories of the lived reality of jolted social worlds and weaves a fascinating meditation on the complex interrelationships between violence, law, and time.

Dionisio Vivo, a young South American lecturer in philosophy, is puzzled by the hideously mutilated corpses that keep turning up outside his front door. To his friend, Ramon, one of the few honest policemen in town, the message is all too clear: Dionisio’s letters to the press, exposing the drug barons, must stop; and although Dionisio manages to escape the hit-men sent to get him, he soon realizes that others are more vulnerable, and his love for them leads him to take a colossal revenge. Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord is the second novel in a trilogy set in South America. It won a Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1992.