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"A potent mixture of history, fiction and literary gamesmanship." "A cunning tribute to a classic." "[A] post-modern literary revenge story.” An ingenious novel of historical invention from the global literary star author of 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 the author
Juan Gabriel Vásquez's previous books include the Dublin Literary Award winner and national bestseller, The Sound of Things Falling, as well as the International Booker finalist The Shape of the Ruins, the award-winning novels The Informers, The Secret History of Costaguana, and the story collections Songs for the Flames and Lovers on All Saints' Day. Vásquez's novels have been published in twenty-eight languages worldwide. After sixteen years in France, Belgium, and Spain, he now lives in Bogotá.
Anne McLean translates Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs, and other writings. She has twice won both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán, and received the Dublin Literary Award with Juan Gabriel Vásquez for his novel The Sound of Things Falling. She lives in Toronto.
