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.

A powerful, humane novel about a man trying to make sense of a war he didn’t choose to fight * Kate Saunders, 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 *
Compelling ... He holds his narrative together with admirable stylistic control as he shows a world falling apart and the powers of love and language to rebuild it * Anita Sethi, Observer *
A compelling and original psychological thriller * Daily Telegraph *
Excellent ... Vasquez follows Balzac's maxim that "novels are the private history of nations" -- Alastair Smart * Sunday Telegraph *
A gripping novel, absorbing right to the end * Edmund White, New York Times Book Review *
The narrative escalates, the mystery deepens, and the scope of the story widens with each page. This terrific novel draws on Colombia’s tragic history and cycles of violence to tell the story of a troubled man trying to come to grips with the distant forces and events that have shaped his life * Khaled Hosseini, Books of the Year 2013 *

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.