The Secret History of Costaguana - Softcover

Vasquez, Juan Gabriel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594485828 ISBN 13: 9781594485824

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2012

Synopsis

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 Vásquez’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 José 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, Vásquez 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning Colombian writer whose work has been translated into fifteen languages. Educated in Colombia and in Paris at the Sorbonne, he is the author of several novels, including The Informers and The Sound of Things Falling; he has also written a short biography of Joseph Conrad. Vasquez lives in Bogota with his family.

Review:

Praise for The Secret History of Costaguana

“Audacious...a potent mixture of history, fiction and literary gamesmanship.” — Los Angeles Times

“An exceptional new novel.” —The Wall Street Journal

 

Praise for Juan Gabriel Vásquez

“One of the most original new voices of Latin American literature."

— Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

“Remarkable . . . Immensely entertaining . . . The best work of literary fiction to come my way since 2005.”

—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

“One hallmark of a gifted novelist is the ability to see the potential for compelling fiction in an incident, anecdote or scrap of history. . . . By that standard and several others, the career of Juan Gabriel Vásquez . . . is off to a notable start.”

—Larry Rohter, The New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1594485828
• ISBN 13: 9781594485824
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320