Praise for Lovers on All Saints’ Day:
“[Vásquez’s] prose is rich in detail and sparkles with poetic lushness, as well as echoing the realist canon in the superb control of plot, setting and characters. Without truculence, he delivers a tense and exciting read.” — Miami Herald
“With few exceptions, the seven stories that compose the collection dwell with hunters, journalists, disgruntled heirs to stately property — but, whatever their occupations and interests, Vásquez searches them out in details that might otherwise have gotten squandered… At times it takes darkness — literally, in the case of the long night in ‘Life on Grimsey Island’ the collection’s final story — to arrive at searing illumination.” — NPR
“The twinned themes of this collection are love and memory, which Vásquez unspools through stories about love affairs, revenge, troubled histories — whole lives and worlds sketched with a few deft strokes.” — The Millions
“Here are revenge, murder and infidelity, dealt with in an elegant, detailed style.” — Financial Times
“[A] pervading atmosphere of melancholy, mists and rural isolation: it is this that gives the collection its powerful sense of coherence and unity…. [Lovers on All Saints’ Day is] a testimony to the early, dark brilliance of Vasquez’ writing.” — Sunday Times (UK)
Praise for The Sound of Things Falling:
Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2014
“[A] Brilliant new novel…gripping…absorbing right to the end. The Sound of Things Falling may be a page turner, but it’s also a deep meditation on fate and death.” —Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review
“Deeply affecting and closely observed.” —Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times
“Like Bolaño, [Vásquez] is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure, and he uses the novel for much the same purpose that Bolaño did: to map the deep, cascading damage done to our world by greed and violence and to concede that even love can’t repair it.” —Lev Grossman, Time Magazine
“The narrative escalates, the mystery deepens, and the scope of the story widens with each page. This terrific novel draws on Colombia’s tragic history and cycles of violence to tell the story of a troubled man trying to come to grips with the distant forces and events that have shaped his life.” —Khaled Hosseini
“Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a considerable writer. The Sound of Things Falling is an artful, ruminative mystery… And the reader comes away haunted by its strong playing out of an irreversible fate.” —E. L. Doctorow
“Razor-sharp” —O, the Oprah Magazine
“An undoubted talent… Introspective and personal.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Vásquez creates characters whose memories resonate powerfully across an ingeniously interlocking structure…Vásquez creates a compelling literary work—one where an engaging narrative envelops poignant memories of a fraught historical period.” —The New Republic
“The Sound of Things Falling is a masterful chronicle of how the violence between the cartels and government forces spilled out to affect and corrode ordinary lives. It is also Vásquez’s finest work to date…. His stark realism – the flip side of the magical variation of his compatriot Gabriel Garcia Marquez – together with his lyrical treatment of memory produces both an electrifying and a sobering read.” –San Francisco Chronicle
Praise for Juan Gabriel Vásquez:
“From the opening paragraph of The Informers, I felt myself under the spell of a masterful writer. Juan Gabriel Vásquez has many gifts—intelligence, wit, energy, a deep vein of feeling—but he uses them so naturally that soon enough one forgets one’s amazement at his talents, and then the strange, beautiful sorcery of his tale takes hold.” —Nicole Krauss
“Juan Gabriel Vásquez is one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature. His first novel, The Informers, a very powerful story about the shadowy years immediately following World War II, is testimony to the richness of his imagination as well as the subtlety and elegance of his prose.” —Mario Vargas Llosa
“What Vásquez offers us, with great narrative skill, is that grey area of human actions and awareness where our capacity to make mistakes, betray, and conceal creates a chain reaction which condemns us to a world without satisfaction. Friends and enemies, wives and lovers, parents and children mix and mingle angrily, silently, blindly, while the novelist uses irony and ellipsis to unmask his characters’ ‘self-protective strategies’ and goes with them – not discovering them, simply accompanying them – as they come to understand that an unsatisfactory life can also be the life they inherit.” —Carlos Fuentes
“For anyone who has read the entire works of Gabriel García Márquez and is in search of a new Colombian novelist, then Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers is a thrilling new discovery.” —Colm Tóibín
“A fine and frightening study of how the past preys upon the present, and an absorbing revelation of a little-known wing of the theatre of the Nazi war.” —John Banville
Praise for The Informers:
“[A] remarkable novel. It deals with big universal themes… It is the best work of literary fiction to come my way since 2005…and into the bargain it is immensely entertaining, with twists and turns of plot that yield great satisfaction.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
“One hallmark of a gifted novelist is the ability to see the potential for compelling fiction in an incident, anecdote or scrap of history, no matter how dry or seemingly obscure, that others have overlooked. By that standard and several others, the career of Juan Gabriel Vásquez…is off to a notable start.…[A] straight-ahead, old-fashioned narrative… Two years ago Mr. Vásquez was included on a list of the most ‘important’ Latin American writers under 40, nominated by more than 2,000 authors, literary agents, librarians, editors and critics. The Informers alone justifies their choice, given its challenging subject and psychological depth, but clearly there are bigger and even more intriguing things on the way.” — Larry Rohter, The New York Times
“Chilling…The past is a shadow-bound, elusive creature in [The Informers]… When pursued it may flee, or, if cornered, it may unleash terrible truths.” —Los Angeles Times
“Compelling…The book combines a reflection on the delicate bonds of family, a journey through one of the few untold stories of World War II and even a look at the sometimes parasitic nature of the media… What sets The Informers, apart from other historical novels is Vasquez’s questioning of his own role as muckraker and writer.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Dramatic and surprising…” —Harper’s Magazine
Praise for The Secret History of Costaguana:
“An intricately detailed, audacious reframing of Nostromo, the classic 1904 Joseph Conrad tale of power, corruption, intrigue and revolution in a South American country he called Costaguana. The Secret History of Costaguana is a potent mixture of history, fiction and literary gamesmanship. Vásquez’s themes are of the moment: powerful countries (the U.S. foremost among them) dabbling in Latin American politics, bribing politicians and journalists, trolling for profits; European writers appropriating history for their own tales. His particular triumph with this novel is to remind us, as Balzac put it, that novels can be ‘the private histories of nations.’”—Los Angeles Times
“[A] post-modern literary revenge story.” —The New York Times
“[An] exceptional new novel…When Mr. Vásquez, like Conrad, focuses on the individuals trapped in these national tragicomedies, he displays a keen emotional and moral awareness. The Secret History of Costaguana is a cunning tribute to a classic, but it also stands on its own merits as a dense and involving story about men who are either manipulating history or finding themselves at the barrel-end of it.” —Wall Street Journal
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