The Informers: Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

Description

A brilliant debut from 'one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature' (Mario Vargas Llosa) 'For anyone who has read the entire works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Informers is a thrilling new discovery' Colm Toibin, Guardian 'One of this year's outstanding books' Financial Times When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, a biography of a Jewish family friend who fled Germany for Colombia shortly before World War Two, it never occurs to him that his father will write a devastating review in a national newspaper. Why does he attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret? As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father's anger, he finds himself undertaking an examination of the guilt and complicity at the heart of Colombian society, as one treacherous act perpetrated in those dark days returns with a vengeance half a century later.

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. His essays, reviews and reportage have appeared in various magazines and literary supplements. He was recently nominated as one of the Bogota 39, South America's most promising writers of the new generation. The Informers is his first novel to be translated into English.Anne McLean has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs and other writings by writers including Carmen Martin Gaite, Orlando Gonzalez, Julio Cortazar and Tomas Eloy Martinez. Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas was a huge international success, selling over 1 million copies worldwide, being translated into more than twenty languages and winning for Cercas and McLean the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction in the UK in 2004.

'For anyone who has read the entire works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and is in search of a new Colombian novelist, then Juan Gabriel Vasquez's The Informers is a thrilling new discovery' * Colm Toibin, Guardian * 'A fine and frightening study of how the past preys upon the present' * John Banville * 'Like Sebald, Vasquez is interested in survivors and in the distortions of history and memory ... One of this year's outstanding books' * Financial Times * 'The examination of the consequences that a single act can have not only for the person committing it but also, through the ripple effect, for many others brings us into the territory of Ian McEwan's Atonement ... an extraordinary tale' * Guardian *