-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
From the brilliant mind of the bestselling, award-winning author of The Sound of Things Falling, a powerful novel about a legendary political cartoonist.
Javier Mallarino is a living legend. He is his country's most influential political cartoonist, the consciousness of a nation. A man capable of repealing laws, overturning judges' decisions, destroying politicians' careers with his art. His weapons are pen and ink. Those in power fear him and pay him homage.
At sixty-five, after four decades of a brilliant career, he's at the height of his powers. But this all changes when he's paid an unexpected visit from a young woman who upends his sense of personal history and forces him to re-evaluate his life and work, questioning his position in the world.
In Reputations, Juan Gabriel Vásquez examines the weight of the past, how a public persona intersects with private histories, and the burdens and surprises of memory. In this intimate novel that recalls authors like Coetzee and Ian McEwan, Vásquez plumbs universal experiences to create a masterful story, one that reverberates long after you turn the final page.
"Starred Review. A brisk and sophisticated study of a conscience in crisis." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Vásquez, who likely came to your attention with 2010's scathing The Informers and certainly made your reading list with The Sound of Things Falling, the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner, returns with a reverberant new work about a life suddenly challenged... [The] response has been ecstatic." - Library Journal
"In this quick, disquieting read, internationally acclaimed Colombian writer Vásquez (The Sound of Things Falling, 2013) explores the reaches of the power employed almost casually by a famous and influential political cartoonist." - Booklist
"Vásquez's prose is luminous, the spooling and unspooling of his characters' thoughts convincing and powerful." - Publishers Weekly
"[A]n account of an old cartoonist eyeing his past and the shifting forms of perception, memory and truth. Brilliant." - Financial Times
This information about Reputations was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Peter Drubin
Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a critically acclaimed Colombian writer, translator, and award-winning author of a collection of stories Los Amantes de Todos los Santos, as well as the novels Historia Secreta de Costaguana and The Informers, which has been translated into seven languages. He has translated works by Victor Hugo, E.M Foster and John Hersey, among others, his essay "El arte de la distorsión" won the Premio Nacional Simón Bolívar, and he is a regular columnist for El Espectador, the newspaper of dissent in Bogotá. Educated in Colombia and in Paris at the Sorbonne, he now lives and teaches in Barcelona, Spain with his wife and twin daughters.
If you liked Reputations, try these:
by Hari Kunzru
Published 2025
From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty and power, capital, art and those who devote their lives to creating it
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth
by Wole Soyinka
Published 2022
From the first Black winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of our fiercest political activists, a fictional meditation on power and greed - at once a literary hoot, a whodunit, and a scathing indictment of political and social corruption.
by Masha Gessen
Published 2021
A bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist's bracing elucidation of our tumultuous times.
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
