The Informers

When Gabriel Santoro's biography is scathingly reviewed by his own father, a public intellectual and famous Bogota rhetorician, Gabriel could not imagine what had pierced his icy exterior to provoke such a painful reaction. A volume that catalogues the life of Sara Guterman, a longtime family friend and Jewish immigrant, since her arrival in Colombia in the 1930s, A Life in Exile seemed a slim, innocent exercise in recording modern history. But as a devastated Gabriel delves, yet again, into Sara's story, searching for clues to his father's anger, he cannot yet see the sinister secret buried in his research that could destroy his father's exalted reputation and redefine his own. After his father's mysterious death in a car accident a few years later, Gabriel sets out anew to navigate half a century of half-truths and hidden meanings. With the help of Sara Guterman and his father's young girlfriend, Angelina, layer after shocking layer of Gabriel's world falls away and a complex portrait of his father emerges from the ruins. From the streets of 1940s Bogota to a stranger's doorstep in 1990s Medellin, he unravels the web of doubt, betrayal, and guilt at the core of his father's life and he wades into a dark, long silenced period of Colombian history after World War II. With a taut, riveting narrative and achingly beautiful prose, Juan Gabriel Vasquez delivers an expansive, powerful exploration of the sins of our fathers, of war's devastating psychological costs, and of the inescapability of the past. A novel that has earned Vasquez comparisons to Sebald, Borges, Roth, and Marquez, The Informers heralds the arrival of a major literary talent.