Product details
- ISBN 9781408831618
- Weight: 232g
- Dimensions: 130 x 196mm
- Publication Date: 12 Sep 2013
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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 Vásquez’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 Bogotá 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.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne between 1996 and 1998, and now lives in Barcelona. His stories have appeared in anthologies in Germany, France, Spain and Colombia, and he has translated works by E. M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. He was recently nominated as one of the Bogotá 39, South America's most promising writers of the new generation. His highly praised novel The Informers, the first of his books to be translated into English, has been published in eight languages worldwide.
Anne McLean has twice won the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction: for Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas in 2004 (which also won her the Valle Inclán Award) and for The Armies by Evelio Rosero in 2009.
