Songs for the Flames

"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 book crammed with human stories in which various tragedies are seen at a distance. And with the characters that could easily have been the protagonists of their own novels”

Juan Gabriel Vasquez is one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature.

For anyone who has read the entire works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and is in search of a new Colombian novelist... a thrilling new discovery.

A masterful writer. Juan Gabriel Vasquez has many gifts-intelligence, wit, energy, a deep vein of feeling-but he uses them so naturally that soon enough one forgets one's amazement at his talents, and then the strange, beautiful sorcery of his tale takes hold.

- Federico Simon

In these nine stories, written in the first person and in prose as swift and elegant as crystal, Vasquez does not build a purely fictional universe, but presents himself, like Cervantes, as a chronicler of events that happened and are in some way part

of his biography. - La Razon

The invisible stitching between these different levels of the story is a great technical achievement - Semana

Nine stories in which the laws of chance burst into the characters' daily lives, leading them to sketch out other stories in which, willingly or not, they become characters in something bigger than themselves - El Tiempo

JUAN GABRIEL VASQUEZ is the author of five previous novels, The Informers, The Secret History of Costaguana, Reputations, The Sound of Things Falling and International Booker-shortlisted The Shape of the Ruins, as well as two acclaimed story collections The All Saints' Day Lovers and Songs for the Flames. He is also the translator into Spanish of works by E. M. Forster, John Hersey and Victor Hugo. His own books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Being economical with the truth allows a photographer to understand something of which she would have preferred to have remained ignorant. A chance meeting at a regimental reunion obliges a veteran of the Korean War to confront his past. A walk-on part in a Polanski film finds the narrator searching the director's face for signs of the aftermath of Sharon Tate's murder. The internet search for a book published in 1887, leads a writer to discover the life of a passionate woman.The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence - sometimes directly, sometimes only tangentially - but whose lives are changed forever by an unexpected encounter or by the operation of incomprehensible forces. Sixteen years after his first collection, Juan Gabriel Vasquez returns to the form with an outstanding set of nine morally complex stories, fresh proof of his narrative versatility and his profound understanding of the lives of others.

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