A bold historical novel from "one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature" (Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature).
In the early twentieth century, a struggling Joseph Conrad wrote his great novel Nostromo, about a South American republic he named Costaguana. It was inspired by the geography and
history of Colombia, where Conrad spent only a few days. But in Juan Gabriel V獺squez's novel The Secret History of Costaguana, we uncover the hidden source- and one of the great literary
thefts.
On the day of Joseph Conrad's death in 1924, the Colombian-born Jos矇 Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop. Many years before, he confessed to Conrad his life's every delicious detail-from
his country's heroic revolutions to his darkest solitary moments. Conrad stole them all. Now Conrad is dead, but the slate is by no means clear- Nostromo will live on and Altamirano must write
himself back into existence. As the destinies of real empires collide with the murky realities of imagined ones, V獺squez takes us from a flourishing twentieth-century London to the lawless fury
of a blooming Panama and back.
Tragic and despairing, comic and insightful, The Secret History of Costaguana is a masterpiece of historical invention. It will secure Juan Gabriel V獺squez's place among the most
original and exuberantly talented novelists working today.
