Juan Gabriel Vásquez

When Gabriel Santoro's 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 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 Bogotá to a stranger's doorstep in 1990s Medellín, 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. In achingly beautiful prose, Juan Gabriel Vásquez delivers a powerful, riveting exploration of the sins of our fathers and the inescapability of the past. A novel that has already earned Vásquez international accolades, as well as comparaisons to W.G. Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip roth, The Informers heralds the arrival of an extraordinary international talent. (front flap)

Juan Gabriel Vásquez retraces his most intense obsessions: the weight of the past, memory faults, how our lives intersect with the political world. But it is also a novel about the importance of opinion in our societies. In the demanding genre of the novel, which has given so many masterpieces in the Latin American tradition, Vásquez gives us his most intimate: an intense reflection on the weakness of public and private judgments on irreversible encounters.

A tale inspired by Joseph Conrad's "Nostromo" follows the story of Colombian-born José Altamirano, who reveals his integral role in the classic's writing and who pens his own version of events against a backdrop of a flourishing twentieth-century London and lawless Panama.

"Tan pronto conoce a Ricardo Laverde, el joven Antonio Yammara comprende que en el pasado de su nuevo amigo hay un secreto, o quizá varios. Su atracción por la misteriosa vida de Laverde, nacida al hilo de sus encuentros en un billar, se transforma en verdadera obsesión el día en que éste es asesinado. Convencido de que resolver el enigma de Laverde le señalará un camino en su encrucijada vital, Yammara emprende una investigación que se remonta a los primeros años setenta, cuando una generación de jóvenes idealistas fue testigo del nacimiento de un negocio que acabaría por llevar a Colombia -- y al mundo -- al borde del abismo. Años después, la exótica fuga de un hipopótamo, último vestigio del imposible zoológico con el que Pablo Escobar exhibía su poder, es la chispa que lleva a Yammara a contar su historia y la de Ricardo Laverde, tratando de averiguar cómo el negocio del narcotráfico marcó la vida privada de quienes nacieron con él." --From publisher's description. The novel El ruido de las cosas al caer (or, The noise of falling things) is set in Bogotá and covers a period in Colombian history ruled by the overwhelming presence of Pablo Escobar, the fearsome drug king who became one of the world's richest men during a lifetime of criminal activity.

"Lovers on All Saints' Day is an emotional book that haunts, moves, and seduces. Juan Gabriel Vasquez, the brilliant novelist, now brings his keen eye and rich prose to the themes of love and memory in these seven powerful stories"--

An influential political cartoonist is paid an unexpected visit by a young woman who upends his sense of personal history and forces him to reevaluate his life, work, and position in the world.

Achingly sad and beautifully crafted, The All Saints' Day Lovers is a remarkable and intense exploration of relationships, loneliness and cruelty. Set mainly in the starkly beautiful landscape of Belgium's Ardennes, these stories have been compared to Maupassant, Chekhov, John Cheever and Antonio Tabucchi. A Colombian writer is witness to a murder which will mark him forever. A woman sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return, while he lies in another woman's bed twenty kilometres away. Through blood-soaked betrayal, a love affair, murder and long-meditated revenge, Vasquez achieves an extraordinary unity of emotion, morality and landscape with these fragmented lives.

Voller Stolz schenkt der junge kolumbianische Journalist Gabriel Santoro seinem Vater, einem bekannten Rhetorikprofessor, sein erstes Buch. Er kann nicht ahnen, dass sein Vater diese Chronik einer befreundeten deutsch-jüdischen Familie mit einem Verriss in der größten Zeitung des Landes zunichte machen wird. Mehr noch, dass er mit der Veröffentlichung seines Buches auf ein dunkles Geheimnis gestoßen ist.

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes, six English-speaking authors and six Spanish-speaking authors have collected 12 original and previously unpublished stories as their tribute to the international influence of these two giants of world literature. An introduction by Salman Rushdie explores the legacy of the two men in contemporary fiction. Don Quixote and the ambuiguity of reading / Ben Okri -- Mir Aslam of Kolachi / Kamila Shamsie -- The dogs of war / Juan Gabriel Vásquez ; translator: Anne McLean -- Coriolanus / Yuri Herrera ; translator: Lisa Dillman -- Glass / Nell Leyshon -- Opening windows / Marcos Giralt Torrente ; translator: Samantha Schnee -- The piano bar / Hisham Matar -- The secret life of Shakespeareans / Soledad Puértolas ; translator: Rosalind Harvey -- Egyptian puppet / Vicente Molina Foix ; translator: Frank Wynne -- The glass woman / Deborah Levy -- The anthology massacre / Rhidian Brook -- Shakespeare, New Mexico / Valeria Luiselli ; translator: Christiana MacSweeney.

In 2014, a man is apprehended at a museum in Bogotá trying to steal the suit that an assassinated politician wore on the day of his death. What is behind--and what is the link between--the 1914 attacks against Colombian senator Rafael Uribe Uribe--who would inspire García Márquez to create Aureliano Buendía from One Hundred Years of Solitude, the leader of the Liberal Party Jorge Eliecer Gaitán--whose death in 1948 would blow up the history of Colombia, and JFK in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963? Carlos Carballo, the protagonist of this story, is a man obsessed with the past who looks for signs and clues to unravel history's secrets and lies. What happens if you look at all these crimes together? Is it possible that they might hold an answer? Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the author-narrator of the novel, had a strange privilege: to hold in his hands the mortal remains of those two politicians whose assassinations affected the 20th century in Colombia. This novel stems from that moment in his life. Those are the ruins described in the title. This is a tale about criminal investigations, but also about the relationship that we establish with the past and with political conspiracies, both real and imaginary. Why do they fascinate us? Why do we insist on searching for hidden culprits in the violent acts that have impacted our history? How do we inherit them even if they happened before we were born? By including himself as a narrator in a fiction work, Vásquez uses events in his own life--from the births of his daughters to the way that he came to hold the remains of two murdered men--to reflect about these topics.

A collection of new Latin American short fiction.

A man who was arrested for attempting to steal a suit belonging to a murdered politician from a Columbian museum sets of a series of public fixations on conspiracy theories, assassinations, and the country's historical secrets.