A bold historical novel from "one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature" (Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature). In the early twentieth century, a struggling Joseph Conrad wrote his great novel Nostromo,about a South American republic he named Costaguana. It was inspired by the geography and history of Colombia, where Conrad spent only a few days. But in Juan Gabriel V#xE1;squez's novel The Secret History of Costaguana,we uncover the hidden source- and one of the great literary thefts. On the day of Joseph Conrad's death in 1924, the Colombian-born Jos#xE9; Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop. Many years before, he confessed to Conrad his life's every delicious detail-from his country's heroic revolutions to his darkest solitary moments. Conrad stole them all. Now Conrad is dead, but the slate is by no means clear- Nostromo will live on and Altamirano must write himself back into existence. As the destinies of real empires collide with the murky realities of imagined ones, V#xE1;squez takes us from a flourishing twentieth-century London to the lawless fury of a blooming Panama and back. Tragic and despairing, comic and insightful, The Secret History of Costaguanais a masterpiece of historical invention. It will secure Juan Gabriel V#xE1;squez's place among the most original and exuberantly talented novelists working today.