Songs for the Flames

In nine first-person stories, violence reaches men and women head-on or only at the edges of their lives, and a chance meeting or a force they cannot fathom alters each of them for ever. A photographer staying at a ranch in the country grows fixated on a painful episode that an elegant fellow guest would rather forget. A Colombian veteran of the Korean War, at what should have been a harmless reunion, must face up to his past. A writer who finds a book from 1887 on the internet is led to Aurelia de León, who reached Colombia as an orphan of the Great War and, grown into a free spirit, clashed with her adopted country's deep conservatism, and to why she lies buried beside a cemetery rather than inside it.

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About the book

Form

Short stories

Length

261 pages in the original

First published

2018 by Alfaguara

Author's age

45 when first published

ISBN

9789585496293 (original)

9781529405446 (MacLehose Press, United Kingdom)

9781529405477 (MacLehose Press, United Kingdom)

9780593190135 (Riverhead Books, United States)

9780593190142 (Riverhead Books, United States)