A new collection of electric, searing stories from award-winning, bestselling author Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence—sometimes directly, sometimes only in passing—but whose lives are changed forever, consumed by fire and by unexpected encounters and unyielding forces. A photographer becomes obsessed with the traumatic past that an elegant woman, a fellow guest staying at a countryside ranch, would rather leave behind. A military reunion forces a soldier to confront a troubling history, both personal and on a larger scale. And in a tour-de-force piece, the search for a book leads a writer to the fascinating story of why a woman is buried next to a graveyard, rather than in it—and the remarkable account of her journey from France to Colombia as a child orphan.Juan Gabriel Vásquez returns to stories with these nine morally complex tales, fresh proof of his...

A bold historical novel from one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature" (Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature).In the early twentieth century, a struggling Joseph Conrad wrote his great novel Nostromo, about a South American republic he named Costaguana. It was inspired by the geography and history of Colombia, where Conrad spent only a few days. But in Juan Gabriel Vásquez's novel The Secret History of Costaguana, we uncover the hidden source- and one of the great literary thefts.On the day of Joseph Conrad's death in 1924, the Colombian-born José Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop. Many years before, he confessed to Conrad his life's every delicious detail-from his country's heroic revolutions to his darkest solitary moments. Conrad stole them all. Now Conrad is dead, but the slate is by no means clear- Nostromo will live on and Altamirano must write himself back into existence. As the destinies of...

July 2009 A virtuosic novel about family, history, memory, and betrayal from the brightest new Latin American literary talent working today. When Gabriel Santoros biography is scathingly reviewed by his own father, a public intellectual and famous Bogotá rhetorician, Gabriel could not imagine what had pierced his icy exterior to provoke such a painful reaction. A volume that catalogues the life of Sara Guterman, a longtime family friend and Jewish immigrant, since her arrival in Colombia in the 1930s, A Life in Exile seemed a slim, innocent exercise in recording modern history. But as a devastated Gabriel delves, yet again, into Saras story, searching for clues to his fathers anger, he cannot yet see the sinister secret buried in his research that could destroy his fathers exalted reputation and redefine his own. After his fathers mysterious death in a car accident a few years later, Gabriel sets out anew to navigate half a century of half-truths and hidden meanings. With the help of Sara Guterman and his fathers young girlfriend, Angelina, layer after shocking layer of Gabriels world falls away and a complex portrait of his father emerges from the ruins. From the streets of 1940s Bogotá to a strangers doorstep in 1990s Medellín, he unravels the web of doubt, betrayal, and guilt at the core of his fathers life and he wades into a dark, longsilenced period of Colombian history after World War II. With a taut, riveting narrative and achingly beautiful prose, Juan Gabriel Vásquez delivers an expansive, powerful exploration of the sins of our fathers, of wars devastating psychological costs, and of the inescapability of the past. A novel that has earned Vásquez comparisons to Sebald, Borges, Roth, and Márquez, The Informers heralds the arrival of a major literary talent.

From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Sound of Things Falling, a brilliant collection of stories that showcases why he is one of the best writers—in any language—working today. Lovers on All Saints' Day is an emotional book that haunts, moves, and seduces. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the brilliant novelist, now brings his keen eye and rich prose to the themes of love and memory in these seven powerful stories. Vásquez achieves an extraordinary unity of emotion with these fragmented lives. A Colombian writer is witness to a murder that will mark him forever. A woman sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return from an expedition to find wood for their stove, while he lies in another woman's bed a few miles away, unable to heal the wound in his own marriage. In these stories, there are love affairs, revenge, troubled pasts, and tender moments that reveal a person's whole history in a few sentences. Set...

The dark, brilliant new novel by the author of The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana.No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde than disaffected young Colombian lawyer Antonio Yammara realises that his new friend has a secret, or rather several secrets. Antonio's fascination with the life of ex-pilot Ricardo Laverde begins by casual acquaintance in a seedy Bogotá billiard hall and grows until the day Ricardo receives a cassette tape in an unmarked envelope. Asking Antonio to find him somewhere private to play it, they go to a library. The first time he glances up from his seat in the next booth, Antonio sees tears running down Laverde's cheeks; the next, the ex-pilot has gone. Shortly afterwards, Ricardo is shot dead on a street corner in Bogotá by a guy on the back of a motorbike and Antonio is caught in the hail of bullets. Lucky to survive, and more out of love with life than ever, he starts asking questions until the...

A sweeping tale of conspiracy theories, assassinations, and twisted obsessions — the much anticipated masterpiece from Juan Gabriel Vásquez.The Shape of the Ruins is a masterly story of conspiracy, political obsession, and literary investigation. A man is arrested at a museum in Colombia for attempting to steal the bullet-ridden suit of an assassin. The incident barely makes the news though the political murder this assassin committed years before set off riots that ushered in a decade of bloody civil war in the country — "La Violencia" — a time that still echos throughout Colombia. Soon this theft takes on greater meaning as it becomes a thread in a widening web of popular obsessions with conspiracy theories and the truth; and it haunts the people who feel that only they know the real truth behind these killings.This novel explores the darkest moments of a country's past and brings to life the hidden characters who have...