The All Saints' Day Lovers

Description

Achingly sad and beautifully crafted, The All Saints' Day Lovers is a remarkable and intense exploration of relationships, loneliness and cruelty. Set mainly in the starkly beautiful landscape of Belgium's Ardennes, these stories have been compared to Maupassant, Chekhov, John Cheever and Antonio Tabucchi.
A Colombian writer is witness to a murder which will mark him forever. A woman sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return, while he lies in another woman's bed twenty kilometres away. Through blood-soaked betrayal, a love affair, murder and long-meditated revenge, Vasquez achieves an extraordinary unity of emotion, morality and landscape with these fragmented lives.

Promotion info

An extraordinarily rich and powerful collection of seven, thematically linked, long stories from the acclaimed prize-winning author of The Sound of Things Falling

Reviews

The narrative escalates, the mystery deepens, and the scope of the story widens with each page ... Terrific Khaled Hosseini, Books of the Year, on The Sound of Things Falling One of the most original new writers of Latin American Literature Mario Vargas Llosa A masterful writer Nicole Krauss Vasquez is one of the great revelations of recent years J. A. Masoliver Rodenas, La Vanguardia Where Carver abandons his Hopper-like silhouettes, Vasquez rescues them Miguel Silva, Gatopardo In the architecture of the collection one thinks of what Tobias Wolff said, quoted in the afterword by Vasquez: "A collection of novellas should be like a novel in which the characters do not know each other" ... There are literary echoes of Madame Bovary, David Copperfield, Georges Perec ... A major name to follow Le Figaro

Author description

Juan Gabriel Vasquez was born in Bogota in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne, and has translated works by E. M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. His previous books have won the IMPAC Award, the Qwerty prize, the Alfaguara Prize and the Gregor von Rezzori Prize, and have been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2014 IMPAC Prize. His books have been published in sixteen languages and thirty countries. After sixteen years in France, Belgium and Spain, he now lives in Bogota. Anne McLean has translated works by many Spanish and Latin American authors including Hector Abad, Carmen Martin Gaite, Julio Cortazar, Ignacio Martinez de Pison, Enrique Vila-Matas and Tomas Eloy Martinez. She lives in Toronto.