Songs for the Flames
Juan Gabriel Vasquez
We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.
To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.
From the publisher
Translated by Anne McClean
“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.