Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Winner of the Alfaguara Prize Winner of the Gregor von Rezzori Prize 'A powerful, humane novel about a man trying to make sense of a war he didn't choose to fight' The Times 'The story is compelling but through Vasquez's vivid prose (rendered brilliantly into English by the award-winning translator Anne McLean) it also becomes haunting ... A poignant and perturbing tale about the inheritance of fear in a country scrabbling to regain its soul' Financial Times No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde in a seedy billiard hall in Bogota 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.

"One of the great novels to have been written in our language" MARIO VARGAS LLOSA "Beautifully written and gripping" Guardian He thought that memories were invisible like light, and just as smoke made light show, there must be a way for memories to be seen... In October 2016, the real-life Colombian film director Sergio Cabrera is attending a retrospective of his films in Barcelona. It's a difficult time for him: his father, Fausto Cabrera, has just died; his marriage is in crisis; and his country has rejected peace agreements that might have ended more than fifty years of war. In the course of a few turbulent and intense days, Sergio will recall the events that marked the family's life, and especially his father's, his sister Marianella's and his own. From the Spanish Civil War to the exile of his republican family in Latin America, and from the Cultural Revolution in China to the guerrilla movements of 1960s Latin America, not only will do we discover a series of adventures extraordinary by any standards, but also a devastating portrait of the forces that for half a century turned the world upside down and created the one we now inhabit. Retrospective is a revelatory and unforgettable novel. Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

"Like Bolano, Vasquez is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure" LEV GROSSMAN, Time Magazine "Juan Gabriel Vasquez . . . has succeeded Garcia Marquez 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 Leon, 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

"One of the great novels to have been written in our language" MARIO VARGAS LLOSA "Beautifully written and gripping" Guardian He thought that memories were invisible like light, and just as smoke made light show, there must be a way for memories to be seen... In October 2016, the real-life Colombian film director Sergio Cabrera is attending a retrospective of his films in Barcelona. It's a difficult time for him: his father, Fausto Cabrera, has just died; his marriage is in crisis; and his country has rejected peace agreements that might have ended more than fifty years of war. In the course of a few turbulent and intense days, Sergio will recall the events that marked the family's life, and especially his father's, his sister Marianella's and his own. From the Spanish Civil War to the exile of his republican family in Latin America, and from the Cultural Revolution in China to the guerrilla movements of 1960s Latin America, not only will do we discover a series of adventures extraordinary by any standards, but also a devastating portrait of the forces that for half a century turned the world upside down and created the one we now inhabit. Retrospective is a revelatory and unforgettable novel. Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

* National Bestseller
* Hailed by Edmund White as "a brilliant new novel" on the cover of the "New York Times Book Review"
* One of NPR's 6 Best Books of the Summer
* "Esquire "recommends "The Sound of Things Falling" "if you read only one book this month"
* Starred early reviews from" Publishers Weekly," "Booklist," "Library Journal," and "Kirkus"
* Lauded by Jonathan Franzen, E. L. Doctorow and many others
From a global literary star comes a prize-winning tour de force - an intimate portrayal of the drug wars in Colombia.
Juan Gabriel Vasquez has been hailed not only as one of South America's greatest literary stars, but also as one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. In this gorgeously wrought, award-winning novel, Vasquez confronts the history of his home country, Colombia. In the city of Bogota, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar's Medellin cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia's streets and in the skies above. Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend's murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend's family have been shaped by his country's recent violent past. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: a time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare. Vasquez is "one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature," according to Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, and "The Sound of Things Falling "is his most personal, most contemporary novel to date, a masterpiece that takes his writing--and will take his literary star--even higher.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019 "Like Don DeLillo's JFK-themed Libra, the novel is an intoxicating blend of fact and fiction" Glasgow Herald "A masterful writer" Nicole Krauss "Vasquez has succeeded Garcia Marquez as the literary grandmaster of Colombia" Ariel Dorfman, New York Review of Books "A dazzlingly choreographed network of echoes and mirrorings" T.L.S. It takes the form of personal and formal investigations into two political assassinations - the murders of Rafael Uribe Uribe in 1914, the man who inspired Garcia Marquez's General Buendia in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and of the charismatic Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, the man who might have been Colombia's J.F.K., gunned down on the brink of success in the presidential elections of 1948. Separated by more than 30 years, the two murders at first appear unconnected, but as the novel progresses Vasquez reveals how between them they contain the seeds of the violence that has bedevilled Colombia ever since. The Shape of the Ruins is Vasquez's most ambitious, challenging and rewarding novel to date. His previous novel, The Sound of Things Falling, won Spain's Alfaguara Prize, Italy's Von Rezzori Prize and the 2014 Dublin IMPAC literary Award. Winner of the Premio Literario Casino da Povoa 2018 Finalist for the Bienal de Novela Mario Vargas Llosa 2016 Finalist for the Premio Bottari Lattes Grinzane 2017 Finalist for the Prix Femina Finalist for the Prix Medicis Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

From the author of "The Sound of Things Falling," a "brilliant new novel" ("New York Times Book Review") and one of the most buzzed about books of the year
"One of the most original new voices of Latin American literature." -- Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
"Unlike anything written by his Latin American contemporaries" ("The Financial Times") "The Informers" secured Juan Gabriel Vasquez's place as one of the most original and exuberantly talented novelist working today. Now he returns with an ingenious new novel of historical invention.
On the day of Joseph Conrad's death in 1924, the Colombian-born Jose 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, Vasquez 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.

"Like Bolano, Vasquez is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure" LEV GROSSMAN, Time Magazine "Juan Gabriel Vasquez . . . has succeeded Garcia Marquez 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 Leon, 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

A taut new novel by the award-winning author of The Sound of Things Falling - 'one of the most original voices of Latin American literature', Mario Vargas Llosa 'An affecting, carefully paced work of psychological realism' Times Literary Supplement As Colombia's famed political cartoonist, Javier Mallarino, strolls through downtown Bogota before a public celebration of his career in the grand Teatro Colon, he contemplates the start of his professional life; 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 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.

In the Bolivian city of Cochabamba, a group of teenaged boys faces its last year in a private Catholic school, attended mostly by the children of upper-class families. Drunken nights, first experiences with drugs and sex, and continuous disciplinary problems are some of the rites of passage with which the students unknowingly try to assert their individuality. In the background, barely hidden beyond the classroom walls, lies the Bolivian reality of the 1980s: strikes, political instability, racism, social inequality, etc. Roby, the narrator, begins to notice all of this, and when a person close to him dies, the things he used to take for granted are suddenly gone; in his quest to solve the mysterious death, Roby will forge a path towards maturity. "En la ciudad boliviana de Cochabamba una clase de muchachos inicia su ultimo curso en un colegio privado y catolico al que asisten sobre todo hijos de familias acomodadas. Las borracheras, los primeros escarceos con las drogas y el sexo y las continuas faltas de disciplina son algunos de los ritos de paso con que los alumnos intentan, sin saberlo, afirmar su individualidad. Al fondo, ligeramente atenuada por los muros del colegio, aparece la realidad boliviana de los ochenta: huelgas, inestabilidad politica, racismo, desigualdades sociales, etcetera. De todo ello va dando cuenta Roby, el narrador de la novela, y cuando la muerte de una persona cercana le sorprende, las certidumbres en las que hasta entonces se apoyaba se tornan irreales; en su intento por resolver el enigma de la muerte, Roby buscara su camino hacia la madurez. "

A virtuosic novel about family, history, memory, and betrayal from the brightest new Latin American literary talent working today.
When Gabriel Santoro's biography is scathingly reviewed by his own father, a public intellectual and famous BogotA 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 Sara's story, searching for clues to his father's anger, he cannot yet see the sinister secret buried in his research that could destroy his father's exalted reputation and redefine his own.
After his father's 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 father's young girlfriend, Angelina, layer after shocking layer of Gabriel's world falls away and a complex portrait of his father emerges from the ruins. From the streets of 1940s BogotA to a stranger's doorstep in 1990s MedellA-n, he unravels the web of doubt, betrayal, and guilt at the core of his father's 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 VAsquez delivers an expansive, powerful exploration of the sins of our fathers, of war's devastating psychological costs, and of the inescapability of the past. A novel that has earned VAsquez comparisons to Sebald, Borges, Roth, and MArquez, "The Informers" heralds the arrival of a major literary talent.