When Gabriel Santoro's book is scathingly reviewed by his own father, a famous Bogotá rhetorician, Gabriel is devastated. Cataloguing the life of longtime family friend Sara Guterman, a Jewish German immigrant who escaped to Colombia during the 1930s, Gabriel's book seemed an innocent attempt to preserve a piece of his country's rapidly vanishing past. But as Gabriel pores over his research looking for clues to his father's anger, he discovers a sinister secret locked in the pages. After his father's death, and with the help of Sara Guterman and his father's girlfriend, Angelina, Gabriel peels back layer after shocking layer of family history -- from the streets of 1940s Bogotá to a stranger's doorstep in 1990s Medellín -- to reveal a hidden portrait of their past-dark, complex, and inescapable. "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's The Informers is a thrilling new discovery"--Colm Toibin, Guardian. "A fine and frightening study of how the past preys upon the present."--John Banville. Like Sebald, Vasquez is interested in survivors and in the distortions of history and memory. One of this year's outstanding books.