The Secret History of Costaguana

By Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Book Overview

"A potent mixture of history, fiction and literary gamesmanship." --Los Angeles Times
"A cunning tribute to a classic." --Wall Street Journal
" A] post-modern literary revenge story." --The New York Times

An ingenious novel of historical invention from the global literary star author of The Sound of Things Falling.

On the day of Joseph Conrad's death in 1924, the Colombian-born Jos Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop. Many years before, he confessed to Conrad his life's every delicious detail--from his country's heroic revolutions to his darkest solitary moments. Those intimate recollections became Nostromo, a novel that solidified Conrad's fame and turned Altamirano's reality into a work of fiction. Now Conrad is dead, but the slate is by no means clear--Nostromo will live on and Altamirano must write himself back into existence.

As the destinies of real empires collide with the murky realities of imagined ones, V squez takes us from a flourishing twentieth-century London to the lawless fury of a blooming Panama and back in a labyrinthine quest to reclaim the past--of both a country and a man.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594485828
• ISBN13: 9781594485824
• Release Date: August 2012
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher