Songs for the Flames

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Anne McLean (Translator)

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Book cover for Songs for the Flames

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"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

  • ISBN10 1529405440
  • ISBN13 9781529405446
  • Publish Date 3 September 2020
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country GB
  • Publisher Quercus Publishing
  • Imprint MacLehose Press
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 208
  • Language English