This was followed by his first novel, Un Mundo para Julius, published in 1970 that became a big success and counts today as one of the classics of Latin American literature.

The novel, which has since been translated into ten languages, tells the story of a young boy who grows up as the youngest of four children of a rich, Peruvian upper-class family.

Un mundo para Julius marks for Bryce Echenique the start of an extremely productive literary career, in which he has until today written nearly twenty novels and story volumes.

Despite this declaration and his spatial and temporal closeness to other Latin American authors of the boom generation, Bryce Echenique keeps a conscious distance from his colleagues who he sometimes refers to as "nouveau riche".

That his style, as one critic once said, corresponds more to an ironic than a magic realism, is also shown by the author in one of his latest novels: La amigdalitis de Tarzán from 1999.

Largely in the form of letters, the novel relates the story of the hindered romantic relationship between a poor Peruvian troubadour and the daughter of an influential Salvadoran family.

Juan Carlos Bondy subsequently found evidence that Bryce had earlier plagiarized the article "Amistad, bendito tesoro" by Ángel Esteban that had appeared in La Nación of Argentina in December, 1996.