Lovers on All Saints Day Stories

Lovers on All Saints' Day is an emotional book that haunts, moves, and seduces. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the brilliant novelist, now brings his keen eye and rich prose to the themes of love and memory in these seven powerful stories.

Vásquez achieves an extraordinary unity of emotion with these fragmented lives. A Colombian writer is witness to a murder that will mark him forever. A woman sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return from an expedition to find wood for their stove, while he lies in another womans bed a few miles away, unable to heal the wound in his own marriage. In these stories, there are love affairs, revenge, troubled pasts, and tender moments that reveal a persons whole history in a few sentences.

Set in Europe (the scene of Vásquezs own self-imposed exile from Latin America) and never before available in English, this collection evokes a singular mood and a tone, and showcase Vásquezs hypnotic writing. Vásquez is a humane, deeply insightful writer, and these stories leave one feeling transformed from the experience of reading them, with a greater vision of humanity and society, a greater understanding of relationships and of love.

“[A] brilliant new novel . . . gripping . . . absorbing right to the end. The Sound of Things Falling may be a page-turner, but its also a deep meditation on fate and death.” —Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review

“Deeply affecting and closely observed.” —Héctor Tobar, Los Angeles Times

“Like Bolaño, [Vásquez] is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure.” —Lev Grossman, Time magazine