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The Sound of Things Falling
Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2014 Winner of the Alfaguara Prize 2011 Winner of the Gregor von Rezzori Prize 2013 No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde in a seedy billiard hall in Bogot� than Antonio Yammara realises that the ex-pilot has a secret. Antonio's fascination with his new friend's life grows until the day Ricardo receives a mysterious, unmarked cassette. Shortly afterwards, he is shot dead on a street corner. Yammara's investigation into what happened leads back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before the cocaine trade trapped Colombia in a living nightmare.
The Shape of the Ruins
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 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. When a man is arrested at a museum for attempting to steal the bullet-ridden suit of a murdered Colombian politician, few notice. But soon this thwarted theft takes on greater meaning as it becomes a thread in a widening web of popular fixations with conspiracy theories, assassinations, and historical secrets; and it haunts those 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 ways in which past violence shapes our present lives. A compulsive read, beautiful and profound, eerily relevant to our times and deeply personal, The Shape of the Ruins is a tour-de-force story by a master at uncovering the incisive wounds of our memories.
The Informers
A brilliant debut from 'one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature' (Mario Vargas Llosa) 'For anyone who has read the entire works of Gabriel García Márquez, The Informers is a thrilling new discovery' Colm Toibin, Guardian 'One of this year's outstanding books' Financial Times When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, a biography of a Jewish family friend who fled Germany for Colombia shortly before World War Two, it never occurs to him that his father will write a devastating review in a national newspaper. Why does he attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret? As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father's anger, he finds himself undertaking an examination of the guilt and complicity at the heart of Colombian society, as one treacherous act perpetrated in those dark days returns with a vengeance half a century later.
Songs for the Flames
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...
Reputations
As Colombia's famed political cartoonist, Javier Mallarino, strolls through downtown Bogotá in the hours before a public celebration of his career in the grand Teatro Colón, he contemplates the start of his professional life, and how he set down his oils and took up a pen to begin drawing caricatures for a living. But the celebration has far-reaching consequences: as he leaves the theatre a figure from his past, now a young woman, emerges from the crowd outside and forces Mallarino to confront an incident that took place in his home half a lifetime ago, calling into question his reputation and the value of his life's work. Vásquez's terse, poetic prose contrasts starkly with the intense and sharply focused content of this beautifully structured novel. Questioning the power of memory and the media, and their ability to distort, inform and destroy, Vásquez plays with the past and the present, challenging our perception of the truth.
The Secret History of Costaguana
"A potent mixture of history, fiction and literary gamesmanship." —Los Angeles Times "A cunning tribute to a classic." —Wall Street Journal "[A] post-modern literary revenge story.” —The New York Times An ingenious novel of historical invention from the global literary star author of The Sound of Things Falling. 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. Those intimate recollections became Nostromo, a novel that solidified Conrad’s fame and turned Altamirano’s reality into a work of fiction. 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 real empires collide with the murky realities of imagined ones, Vásquez takes us from a flourishing twentieth-century London to the lawless fury of a blooming Panama and back in a labyrinthine quest to reclaim the past—of both a country and a man.
The Secret History of Costaguana
London, 1903. Joseph Conrad is struggling with his new novel ('I am placing it in South America in a Republic I call Costaguana'). Progress is slow and the great writer needs help from a native of the Caribbean coast of South America. José Altamirano, Colombian at birth, who has just arrived in London, answers the great writer's advertisement and tells him his life story. José has been witness to the most horrible things that a person or a country could suffer, and drags with him not just a guilty conscience but a story that has almost destroyed him.But when Nostromo is published the following year José is outraged by what he reads: 'You've eliminated me from my own life. You, Joseph Conr...
The Informers
‘A writer at the peak of his powers . . . The book takes us from the first to the seventh circles of hell, from Salinger to de Sade’ - Will Self The Informers is a collection of short stories with intertwining characters, from the author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis. Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. The characters go to the same schools. They eat at the same restaurants. They have sex with the same boys and girls. They buy from the same dealers. Fusing voices into an intense, impressionistic narrative that blurs genders, generations and even identities, these stories capture the lives of a group of people, connected in the way only people in L.A. can be – suffering from nothing less than the death of the soul.
Retrospective
An epic yet intimate novel about a Colombian man caught up in the sweep of global historical and ideological revolutions. The Colombian film director, Sergio Cabrera, is in Barcelona for a retrospective of his work. It's a hard time for him: his father, famous actor Fausto Cabrera, has just died; his marriage is in crisis; and his home country has rejected peace agreements that might have ended more than fifty years of war. In the course of a few intense days, as his films are on exhibit, Sergio recalls the events that marked his family's unusual and dramatic lives: especially his father's, his sister Marianella's and his own. Growing up in Colombia as the children of famous actors, Sergio a...
Songs for the Flames
"Like Bolaño, Vásquez is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure" LEV GROSSMAN, Time Magazine "Juan Gabriel Vásquez . . . has succeeded García Márquez as the literary grandmaster of Colombia" ARIEL DORFMAN, New York Review of Books A morally complex, searing set of stories by the award-winning author of The Sound of Things Falling and The Shape of the Ruins (shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2019). A renowned photographer probes a traumatic incident in the life of a fellow guest at a countryside ranch. A chance meeting at a regimental reunion obliges a Korean War veteran to confront a shameful secret. And in the title story, an internet search for a book published in 1887 leads to the discovery of the life of a remarkable woman: Aurelia de Léon, who arrives in Colombia as a child orphan of the Great War, but as a free-spirited adult runs foul of her adoptive country's deep conservatism. The characters in Songs for the Flames are all men and women touched by violence - sometimes directly, sometimes tangentially - but the lives of all of them are irrevocably changed by the experience. Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
