Cuando el periodista Gabriel Santoro public su primer libro, no pens que la cr tica m s destructiva fuera a ser escrita por su propio padre. El tema de su libro parec a inofensivo: la vida de una mujer alemana que lleg a Colombia poco antes de la Segunda Guerra. Pero el padre de Santoro se sinti traicionado. Por qu ? En el libro hay algo que Santoro no hab a previsto. Entre las frases se esconde un secreto.

Ahora Santoro ha empezado a descubrir cu l es. Mientras se interna en el coraz n de la vida de su padre, mientras revela los secretos del presente, otras cosas ir n saliendo a la luz: las formas en que la guerra que ocurr a al otro lado del mar invadi la vida de quienes estaban de este lado; los sucesos de la d cada de los cuarenta, que en Colombia destruyeron familias, trastocaron vidas, arruinaron destinos , etc.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

From the author of The Sound of Things Falling, a brilliant new novel (New York Times Book Review) and one of the most buzzed about books of the year

One of the most original new voices of Latin American literature. -- Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

When Gabriel Santoro's book is scathingly reviewed by his own father, a famous Bogot rhetorician, Gabriel is devastated. Cataloguing the life of longtime family friend Sara Guterman, a Jewish German immigrant who escaped to Colombia during the 1930s, Gabriel's book seemed an innocent attempt to preserve a piece of his country's rapidly vanishing past. But as Gabriel pours over his research looking for clues to his father's anger, he discovers a sinister secret locked in the pages. After his father's death, and with the help of Sara Guterman and his father's girlfriend, Angelina, Gabriel peels back layer after shocking layer of family history-from the streets of 1940s Bogot to a stranger's doorstep in 1990s Medell n-to reveal a hidden portrait of their past-dark, complex, and inescapable.

Juan Gabriel V squez has been hailed as one of the leading writers of his generation, compared to Borges, John Le Carre, Joseph Conrad and W. G. Sebald.