The Shape of the Ruins

Juan Gabriel Vásquez · b. 1973 · Colombia

Originally La forma de las ruinas (Spanish) · translated by Anne McLean

Why it matters

A novelist investigates two unsolved political assassinations, one from 1914 and one from 1948, and the conspiracy theorists obsessed with them, blurring his own biography into Colombia's buried, unresolved violence.

At a glance

A braided true-crime investigation and autobiographical fiction complicate a dense historical mystery.