Book description
The dark, brilliant new novel by the author of The Informers and The
Secret History of Costaguana. No sooner does he get to know Ricardo
Laverde than disaffected young Colombian lawyer Antonio Yammara realises
that his new friend has a secret, or rather several secrets. Antonio's
fascination with the life of ex-pilot Ricardo Laverde begins by casual
acquaintance in a seedy Bogota billiard hall and grows until the day
Ricardo receives a cassette tape in an unmarked envelope. Asking Antonio
to find him somewhere private to play it, they go to a library. The
first time he glances up from his seat in the next booth, Antonio sees
tears running down Laverde's cheeks; the next, the ex-pilot has gone.
Shortly afterwards, Ricardo is shot dead on a street corner in Bogota by
a guy on the back of a motorbike and Antonio is caught in the hail of
bullets. Lucky to survive, and more out of love with life than ever, he
starts asking questions until the questions become an obsession that
leads him to Laverde's daughter. His troubled investigation leads all
the way back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before
the cocaine trade trapped a whole generation of Colombians in a living
nightmare of fear and random death. Juan Gabriel Vasquez is one of the
leading novelists of his generation, and The Sound of Things Falling
that tackles what became of Colombia in the time of Pablo Escobar is his
best book to date. From the opening paragraph I felt myself under the
spell of a masterful writer Nicole Krauss [on The Informers] As if
mature Le Carre had wandered into the narrative labyrinths of Borges
Boyd Tonkin, Independent [on The Informers] A thrilling new discovery
Colm Toibin A fine and frightening study John Banville [on The
Informers] One of the most original original voices of Latin American
literature Mario Vargas Llosa Juan Gabriel Vasquez was born in Bogota
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 Bogota 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 Inclan Award) and for The Armies by Evelio Rosero in 2009.
