The Time of the Hero

The Time of the Hero (original title: La ciudad y los perros, literally "The City and the Dogs", 1963) is a 1963 novel by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in 2010. It was Vargas Llosa's first novel and is set among the cadets at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, which he attended as a teenager. The novel portrays the school so scathingly that its leadership burned a large number of copies and condemned the book as Ecuadorian propaganda against Peru.

It is notable for its experimental and complex employment of multiple perspectives.

The novel was later turned into a film by Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi.