The Shape of the Ruins

Like Don DeLillo’s JFK-themed Libra, the novel is an intoxicating blend of fact and fiction - Glasgow Herald

Beautifully voiced by his serial translator Anne McLean, Vasquez writes with the elliptical feints and ruses of a story-teller who admires Joseph Conrad in his most delphic moods. The result is sly, subtle, captivating. - Spectator.

The most famous novelist to come out of Colombia since Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His subtle, nuanced fiction uses the tools of documentary reportage - historical sleuthing and interviews with witnesses - to steer readers through the nation’s labyrinthine past - 1843 Mag (Economist)

This clever, labyrinthine, thoroughly enjoyable historical novel by the Colombian author of The Informers and The Sound of Things Falling entangles the two deaths and investigates the internecine politics that lay behind them. - Guardian

Assembled with satisfying complexity … it’s his most ambitious and accomplished work yet. - Prospect

For anyone who has read the entire works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and is in search of a new Colombian novelist, then Juan Gabriel Vasquez … is a thrilling new discovery. - Guardian.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Shape of the Ruins is a highly sophisticated, fast-moving political thriller set in Colombia and an excellent read

Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s latest and most ambitious novel…. A dazzlingly choreographed network of echoes and mirrorings - Times Literary Supplement