Synopses & Reviews
* National Bestseller and winner of the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award * Hailed by Edmund White as "a brilliant new novel" on the cover of the New York Times Book Review
* Lauded by Jonathan Franzen, E. L. Doctorow and many others
From a global literary star comes a prize-winning tour de force an intimate portrayal of the drug wars in Colombia.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez has been hailed not only as one of South Americas greatest literary stars, but also as one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. In this gorgeously wrought, award-winning novel, Vásquez confronts the history of his home country, Colombia. In the city of Bogotá, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobars Medellín cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombias streets and in the skies above. Back then, Antonio witnessed a friends murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friends family have been shaped by his countrys recent violent past. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: a time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare. Vásquez is one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature,” according to Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Sound of Things Falling is his most personal, most contemporary novel to date, a masterpiece that takes his writingand will take his literary stareven higher.
Review
“The Confidant is an impressive blend of historical precision, high suspense and sharp-sighted psychological truths. A gorgeous, captivating novel with brilliant storytelling. It’s a novel that will stay with me.”
Review
“Captivating and haunting, the passion and heartache absolutely leap off the page in Hélène Grémillon’s The Confidant . The first thing you’ll want to do after finishing, is to flip to the first chapter and start reading it all over again, combing for overlooked clues.”
Review
“Succumb to a very French story and allow yourself to be seduced by Hélène Grémillon’s serpentine tale of wartime passion and revenge. As the past intensifies its grip on a young woman’s present, shifting perspectives exert an irresistible pull. Direct, unsettling and atmospheric.”
Review
“Helene Gremillon tells her heartrending tale of human frailty, cruelty and love in prose of subtle elegance, and her flawed, fascinating characters stayed with me long after I’d finished the book. This is poised and beautiful storytelling.”
Review
“The Confidant is a must read for anyone who loves intrigue. It will keep you guessing until the very last page - beautifully written, original and thoroughly engaging.”
Review
“A beautiful, intricate book,
The Confidant is held together with delicate threads and secrets. I scarcely know how to review it without inadvertently giving one away. Its a story of enduring emotions—love, jealousy, revenge—and the lengths that we will go to in their name. A love story, a thriller, a war novel,
The Confidant is hard to put down. And, when you do, youll want to flip back to the beginning and read again to see what clues you may have missed the first time. This gripping little story with its flawed, yet memorable characters is highly recommended.” An Editor's Choice pick, February 2013
Review
"Hélène Grémillon takes us to the heart of a family secret. We witness undeclared love, hidden hatreds, and revenge with terrible consequences. She writes of two periods in time in two voices. And we are twice as caught up in this book which truly touches our hearts."
Review
"The reader is literally riveted to this story, both thriller and historical account. The text has accents of maturity, a stunning mastery of narration, a sense of suspense worthy of a top-notch film. A gripping first novel."
Review
Praise for Syndrome E:
“Compulsively readable . . . An eerie psychological mystery with a truly stunning resolution.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A crackerjack story that most readers will devour in one sitting . . . Spare evocative prose propels French author Thilliezs stellar U.S. debut.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Blending science and neurology into the intrigue of his excellent thriller, Thilliez takes us into the maze of the human brain, with all the evils it can unleash.”
—Elle (Paris)
“With a fascinating blend of noir procedural, espionage flavor, and an eerie set up that makes the video from The Ring seem harmless, it is no surprise that Syndrome E has already been an international sensation. Beneath its dazzling, byzantine plot are menacing questions of what lurks at the intersection between the new and chilling capabilities of neuroscience and the ancient but more-chilling capabilities of human evil.”
—Michael Koryta, New York Times-bestselling author of The Prophet and Tonight I Said Goodbye
“This terrific French thriller . . . boasts distinctive characters you want to spend time with, a lively plot, evocative settings, fun film references and, icing on the cake, an enjoyable offbeat romance. Having achieved bestseller status in Europe, Thilliez is poised to do the same in the U.S.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Detective Lucie Henebelle is an overwhelmed single mother who doesnt need more trouble. Then she gets the call from a friend who has gone blind after watching an obscure film embedded with heinous images. Its her colleague, a profiler for the Paris police department, who makes the connection between the movie and the five men murdered at a construction site. Twisty neuroscience! Who can resist?”
—New York Daily News
“A tour de force . . . A captivating plot that keeps the reader in his seat until the final moments.”
—Le Monde Magazine
Review
A scholarly whodunit... anyone who loves a good mystery can share the quest. (
The New York Times Book Review)
The mix of mathematics and murder mystery makes for a powerful cocktail. (The Guardian, London)
Review
" Martinez's novel is full of explanations and parried literary thrusts, culminating in a growing sense of understanding that order and chaos aren't yin and yang but mirror images of each other."
-Los Angeles Times
" This is a clever, chilling novel that takes crime writing to a new level."
-The Sunday Times (London)
" As clever and as erudite as Borges, this is also a gripping thriller written in lucid and compelling prose."
-The Independent (London)
" This riveting tale will appeal to readers of literary fiction and thriller fans alike."
-Publishers Weekly
Review
Praise for The Sound of Things Falling
"[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, [Vasquez] 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 cant repair it." —Lev Grossman, Time Magazine
"Juan Gabriel Vasquez 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
"Compelling…genuine and magnificently written." —Library Journal, STARRED
“Literary magic of one of Latin Americas most talented novelists…a masterpiece.” —Booklist, STARRED
“An exploration in the ways in which stories profoundly impact our lives.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED
“Languid existential noir, one that may put you in mind of Paul Auster.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times
"If you only read one book this month..." —Esquire
"Razor-sharp" —O, the Oprah Magazine
“An undoubted talent… Introspective and personal.” —The Wall Street Journal
"It's noir raised to the level of art. It's a page-turner but it's also a profound meditation on fate and mortality." —2013 Premior Gregor von Rezzori Prize announcement
“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.” —Malcolm Forbes, San Francisco Chronicle
“Haunting…Vasquez brilliantly and sensitively illuminates the intimate effects and whispers of life under siege, and the moral ambiguities that inform survival.” - Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Moving… The novel presents the human toll exacted by the countrys years of violence.” - New York Observer
“Quietly elegant… Vásquez is a resourceful storyteller. Scenes and dialogue shine with well-chosen details. His theme echoes compellingly through family parallels, ill-fated flights and even a recurring hippo motif. He shrugs off the long shadow of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a gritty realism that has its own persuasive magic.” — Bloomberg News
Praise for Juan Gabriel Vasquez
"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
“To read The Informers is to enjoy the shock of new talent… [Vásquezs] novel is subtle, surprising and deeply pleasurable, with razors secreted among its pages.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“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…” —Harpers Magazine
“Unlike anything written by his Latin American contemporaries. If there is any prevailing influence in this chilling work, it is in the late German writer, W.G. Sebald…The Informers deserves to be read…[O]ne of this years outstanding books.” —The Financial Times
“Masterful…Vásquez has much in common with Roberto Bolaño…. But unlike Bolaños stolid, serviceable prose, Vásquezs style is musical, occasionally even lush, and its poeticism remains unmuddled in McLeans translation.” —Bookforum
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
“[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
[A] post-modern literary revenge story.” —The New York Times
Synopsis
"A cunningly plotted tale that is by turns cerebral, suspenseful--and ultimately shocking." -Publishers Weekly A gripping psychological thriller for fans of The Girl on the Train and The Silent Wife about a wife's secrets, a husband accused of murder, and a marriage gone terribly wrong
Buenos Aires, 1987. When a beautiful young woman named Lisandra is found dead at the foot of a six-story building, her husband, a psychoanalyst, is immediately arrested for her murder. Convinced of Vittorio's innocence, one of his patients, Eva Maria, is drawn into the investigation seemingly by chance. As she combs through secret recordings of Vittorio's therapy sessions in search of the killer--could it be the powerful government figure? the jealous woman? the musician who's lost his reason to live?--Eva Maria must confront her most painful memories, and some of the darkest moments in Argentinian history.
In breathless prose that captures the desperate spinning of a frantic mind, Helene Gremillon blurs the lines of past and present, personal and political, reality and paranoia in this daring and compulsively readable novel.
Synopsis
"A gripping first novel" (Le Figaro Littéraire) and an award-winning international sensation as haunting and unforgettable as Suite Française
Paris, 1975. Camille sifts through letters of condolence after her mother's death when a strange, handwritten missive stops her short. At first she believes she received it by mistake. But then, a new letter arrives each week from a mysterious stranger, Louis, who seems intent on recounting the story of his first love, Annie. They were separated in the years before World War II when Annie befriended a wealthy, barren couple and fell victim to a merciless plot just as German troops arrive in Paris. But also awaiting Camille's discovery is the other side of the story, which will call into question Annie's innocence and reveal the devastating consequences of jealousy and revenge. As Camille reads on, she begins to realize that her own life may be the next chapter in this tragic story.
Synopsis
What You Dont See Could Kill You
In this international bestseller, which is soon to be a major motion picture penned by the screenwriter of Black Swan, the classic procedural meets cutting-edge science
Lucie Henebelle, single mother and beleaguered detective, has just about enough on her plate when she receives a panicked phone call from an ex-lover who has developed a rare disorder after watching an obscure film from the 1950s. With help from the brooding Inspector Franck Sharko, who is exploring the movies connection to five unearthed corpses at a construction site, Lucie begins to strip away the layers of what may be the most disturbing film ever made. With more lives on the line, Sharko and Lucie struggle to solve this terrifying mystery before its too late. In a high-stakes, adrenaline-fueled hunt that jumps from France to Canada, Egypt to Rwanda, and beyond, this astonishing page-turner, with cinematic echoes from The Manchurian Candidate and the Bourne series, will keep you guessing until the very end.
Synopsis
The sensational new novel from one of the most talented crime writers alive” (The Washington Post)
The photo on the card shows a boy who was found murdered, a year ago, on the grounds of a girls boarding school in the leafy suburbs of Dublin. The caption saysI KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.
Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to get a foot in the door of Dublins Murder Squadand one morning, sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey brings him this photo. The Secret Place,” a board where the girls at St. Kildas School can pin up their secrets anonymously, is normally a mishmash of gossip and covert cruelty, but today someone has used it to reignite the stalled investigation into the murder of handsome, popular Chris Harper. Stephen joins forces with the abrasive Detective Antoinette Conway to find out who and why.
But everything they discover leads them back to Hollys close-knit group of friends and their fierce enemies, a rival cliqueand to the tangled web of relationships
that bound all the girls to Chris Harper. Every step in their direction turns up the pressure. Antoinette Conway is already suspicious of Stephens links to the Mackey family. St. Kildas will go a long way to keep murder outside their walls. Hollys father, Detective Frank Mackey, is circling, ready to pounce if any of the new evidence points toward his daughter. And the private underworld of teenage girls can be more mysterious and more dangerous than either of the detectives imagined.
The Secret Place is a powerful, haunting exploration of friendship and loyalty, and a gripping addition to the Dublin Murder Squad series.
Synopsis
Two mathematicians must join forces to stop a serial killer in this spellbinding international bestseller A paperback sensation in Argentina, Spain, and the United Kingdom, The Oxford Murders has been hailed as "a remarkable feat" (Time Out London) and its author as "one of Argentina's most distinctive voices" (The Times Literary Supplement). It begins on a summer day in Oxford, when a young Argentine graduate student finds his landlady-an elderly woman who helped crack the Enigma Code during World War II -murdered in cold blood. Meanwhile, a renowned Oxford logician receives an anonymous note bearing a circle and the words "the first of a series." As the murders begin to pile up and more symbols are revealed, it is up to this unlikely pair to decipher the pattern before the killer strikes again.
Synopsis
A chilling new tale of literary intrigue from the author of the international sensation The Oxford Murders When Guillermo Martínez 's novel The Oxford Murders was first published in the United States, The New York Times Book Review called it "a scholarly whodunit [for] anyone who loves a good mystery." Now Martínez returns with a worthy followup: the mesmerizing The Book of Murder. A young writer finds himself unexpectedly tangled up in the story of Luciana, his former assistant and Kloster, bestselling author and rival. What he discovers about the deaths surrounding Luciana will make him question everything he had always believed-and taken for granted-about chance and calculation, cause and effect.
About the Author
Hélène Grémillon was born in France in 1977. She has degrees in literature and history and has worked as a journalist at the French newspaper,
Le Figaro, before becoming a full-time writer. She lives in Paris with her partner, singer and songwriter Julien Clerc, and their child. She received The Prince Pierre Literary Prize for
The Confidant, her first novel.
Visit www.helenegremillon.com.