Хуан Габриэль Васкес: The Informers

A virtuosic novel about family, history, memory, and betrayal from the brightest new Latin American literary talent working today.

When Gabriel Santoro s biography is scathingly reviewed by his own father, a public intellectual and famous Bogota rhetorician, Gabriel could not imagine what had pierced his icy exterior to provoke such a painful reaction. A volume that catalogues the life of Sara Guterman, a longtime family friend and Jewish immigrant, since her arrival in Colombia in the 1930s, A Life in Exile seemed a slim, innocent exercise in recording modern history. But as a devastated Gabriel delves, yet again, into Sara s story, searching for clues to his father s anger, he cannot yet see the sinister secret buried in his research that could destroy his father s exalted reputation and redefine his own.

After his father s mysterious death in a car accident a few years later, Gabriel sets out anew to navigate half a century of half-truths and hidden meanings. With the help of Sara Guterman and his father s young girlfriend, Angelina, layer after shocking layer of Gabriel s world falls away and a complex portrait of his father emerges from the ruins. From the streets of 1940s Bogota to a stranger s doorstep in 1990s Medellin, he unravels the web of doubt, betrayal, and guilt at the core of his father s life and he wades into a dark, longsilenced period of Colombian history after World War II.

With a taut, riveting narrative and achingly beautiful prose, Juan Gabriel Vasquez delivers an expansive, powerful exploration of the sins of our fathers, of war s devastating psychological costs, and of the inescapability of the past. A novel that has earned Vasquez comparisons to Sebald, Borges, Roth, and Marquez, The Informers heralds the arrival of a major literary talent.