The Antiquarian

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

A Best Book of the Summer: Los Angeles Times and Publishers Weekly

An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Mystery, Thriller & Suspense)

Three years have passed since Gustavo, a renowned psycholinguist, last spoke to his closest friend, Daniel, who has been interned in a psychiatric ward for murdering his fiancée. When Daniel unexpectedly calls to confess the truth behind the crime, Gustavo’s long buried fraternal loyalty resurfaces and draws him into the center of a quixotic investigation.

While Daniel reveals his unsettling story using fragments of fables, novels, and historical allusions, Gustavo begins to retrace the past for clues: from their early college days exploring dust-filled libraries and exotic brothels to Daniel’s intimate attachment to his sickly younger sister and his dealings as a book collector. As the circumstances grow increasingly intricate, Gustavo is forced to deduce an sinister series of events from allegories that are more real than police reports and metaphors more revealing than evidence.

With sumptuous prose and haunting imagery, Faverón Patriau has crafted an unforgettable, labyrinthine tale of murder, madness, and passion that is as entertaining as it is erudite and dark as it is illuminating.

Gustavo Faverón Patriau is a professor at Bowdoin College with a masters and PhD from Cornell and a BA from Universidad Católica del Perú. He has also taught at Stanford and Middlebury and edited anthologies in Spanish on politics and Roberto Bolaño, worked as a journalist and editor; Spanish newspaper ABC called his blog on literature "the most influential of Hispanic America." He was born in Lima, Peru, in 1966, and lives in Maine. Blog: gustavofaveron.blogspot.com; Twitter: @gfaveron

Joseph Mulligan is a writer and translator. He has translated major works by César Vallejo, Pierre Joris, Oliverio Girondo, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Jorge Eduardo Eielson. He currently lives in New Paltz, NY and works at a translation agency in New York City.