"Like Bolaño, Vásquez is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure" LEV GROSSMAN, Time Magazine


"Juan Gabriel Vásquez . . . has succeeded García Márquez 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 Léon, 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

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature. -- Mario Vargas Llosa
For anyone who has read the entire works of Gabriel García Márquez and is in search of a new Colombian novelist... a thrilling new discovery. -- Colm Tóibín
A masterful writer. Juan Gabriel Vásquez 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. -- Nicole Krauss
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 -- El Pais * Federico Simon *

In these nine stories, written in the first person and in prose as swift and elegant as crystal, Vásquez 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.

JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ 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. ANNE MCLEAN has translated works by Hector Abad, Julio Cortázar and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has twice won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, for Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas and for The Armies by Evelio Rosero, and in 2012 was awarded the Spanish Cross of the Order of Civil Merit.