A brilliant historical and postmodern novel from the author of The Sound of Things Falling. Many years ago, Colombian native José Altamirano told the writer Joseph Conrad the story of his life, and under the writer’s pen it turned into fiction, the novel Nostromo. Colombia, torn by political strife, became in him a semi-mythical Costaguana. But now the Colombian yearns to record his burning confession himself and restore the true course of events - the storms of revolution, the search for his father, the epic construction of the Panama Canal, the circumstances of unexpected love and flight to Europe... Juan Gabriel Vazquez, with an ingenuity worthy of the heir of Marquez, Borges and Cortazar, plays with the reader, inviting the reader to see behind the classic text another text, saturated with the blood of reality, but in fact also uncompromisingly mixing the fate of empires, testimonies of participants in historical events and the magnificent fruits of the writer’s imagination.