The Informers

 

 

‘From the opening paragraph of The Informers, I felt myself under the spell of a masterful writer’ Nicole Krauss

 

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.

 

For anyone who has read the entire works of Gabriel García Márquez and is in search of a new Colombian novelist, then Juan Gabriel Vásquez's The Informers is a thrilling new discovery’ Colm Tóibín, Guardian

 

‘Juan Gabriel Vásquez is one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature’ Mario Vargas Llosa

 

‘A fine and frightening study of how the past preys upon the present’

John Banville

The Secret History of Costaguana

 

 

‘With wonderful panache, Vásquez has reinvented Conrad and his literary geography ... A vivid, forceful, masterly book’ Alberto Manguel, Guardian

 

London, 1903. Joseph Conrad is struggling with his new novel set in the South American Republic he calls ‘Costaguana’. José Altamirano, Colombian by birth, has just arrived in London, and comes to the writer’s aid by telling him his life story. When Nostromo is published the following year, however, José is outraged: his story is nowhere to be found. But the reader is about to discover the true story.

 

The Secret History of Costaguana is a comic, tragic, despairing, but above all exhilarating novel, told by a bumptious narrator with a score to settle. It is Latin America’s lively riposte to Europe’s limiting vision of the continent and confirms Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s reputation as one of the leading novelists of his generation.

 

‘Splendid’ Daily Telegraph

 

‘Highly layered and intelligent … the most erudite and inventive Colombian novelist writing today’ Independent

 

 

 

 

 

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