El libro de la envidia

Bogotá, 31 August 1896. The poet José Asunción Silva has been dead for three months, a suicide as far as anyone cares, but the Loco Cacanegra, a familiar figure on the city's streets, has carried another truth all that time: the poet was killed, and he witnessed it. With his friend the Virreyna, a prostitute, at his side and almost everything against him, he spends one day trying to force the matter into the open. Around this chase the book gathers small lives: a tyrannical police inspector, a bookseller unsure how to answer his best friend's strange love, a Black woman who reads the tarot, a Frenchman and an American bickering out of homesickness, and the city's owners guarding their worst secrets. Taking up a biographer's theory of Silva's murder, it sees envy as the oldest vice of the capital.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

525 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, Crime (assigned by AI)

Set in

Colombia, 1896

First published

2014 by Alfaguara

Author's age

39 when first published

ISBN

9789587587050 (original)