It is the author's longest and most ambitious novel, being an attempt to portray the whole of Peruvian life, by means of representations of geographic and social scenes of the entire country, although its focus is on the Andean sierra.

The novel starts with the suicide of Don Andres Aragon of Peralta, head of the most powerful family in the village of San Pedro de Lahuaymarca, in the mountains of Peru.

Don Bruno is a traditional landowner and fanatical Catholic, who doesn't want his tenant farmers or Indian slaves contaminated by modernity, which, according to his judgment, corrupts people.

Anticipating the need for abundant water to work the mine, the company shows interest in the lands of the town and the neighboring rural communities, requiring that they be sold at ridiculously low prices; this counts on the complicity of corrupt authorities.

Then there begins a process of unrest that leads to the mobilisation of peasants led by Rendon Willka, an Indian rebel who has lived in the capital of the country where he has learnt a lot.

Its large question revolves around the possibility of achieving genuine national development, with the certainty that a historical era of the country has ended, and that a new homeland must be built on its ruins.

These reviews were devastating for Arguedas, who, according to Mario Vargas Llosa, wrote later that night these heartbreaking lines: ... it was almost proved by two wise sociologists and an economist, [...] that my book Todas las sangres is detrimental to the country, I don't have anything to do in this world anymore.

Vargas Llosa argues that the work is also flawed in this respect, that the description of Peruvian society is profoundly false and unconvincing, not because of distance from objective truth, but because of a lack of internal force emanating from the intricacies of the fiction.

In the intellectual underworld of Peru, bound to political power, is a subsidiary Western worldview, strongly refuted and distorted by current social historical reality.