
Songs for the Flames
Stories
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $13.50
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Sheldon Romero
-
Alfredo Huereca
About this listen
A new collection of electric, searing stories from award-winning, best-selling author Juan Gabriel Vásquez.
The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence - sometimes directly, sometimes only in passing - but whose lives are changed forever, consumed by fire and by unexpected encounters and unyielding forces.
A photographer becomes obsessed with the traumatic past that an elegant woman, a fellow guest staying at a countryside ranch, would rather leave behind. A military reunion forces a soldier to confront a troubling history, both personal and on a larger scale. And in a tour-de-force piece, the search for a book leads a writer to the fascinating story of why a woman is buried next to a graveyard, rather than in it - and the remarkable account of her journey from France to Colombia as a child orphan.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez returns to stories with these nine morally complex tales, fresh proof of his narrative versatility and his profound understanding of the lives of others. There’s a romantic wistfulness that combusts with the realities of dangerous histories, both personal and political, to throw these characters into the flames from which they either emerge purified, reborn, or burned and destroyed.
©2021 Juan Gabriel Vasquez (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
-
The Little Liar
- A Novel
- By: Mitch Albom
- Narrated by: Mitch Albom
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Eleven-year-old Nico Krispis has never told a lie. When the Nazis invade his home in Salonika, Greece, the trustworthy boy is discovered by a German officer, who offers him a chance to save his family. All Nico has to do is persuade his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading “north,” where new jobs and safety await. Unaware that this is all a cruel ruse, the innocent boy reassures passengers on the station platform every day.
-
-
Timeliness and timelessness
- By JStan on 02-25-24
By: Mitch Albom
-
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
-
-
Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Call Me Hunter
- A Novel
- By: Jim Shockey
- Narrated by: Scott Brick, Jim Shockey
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Once in a long while, a child is born possessing the rarest of gifts, the innate ability to feel impossible beauty, to recognize priceless works of art. When such a child is discovered, a 250-year-old secret organization called Our World trains them to acquire the greatest works of art through theft, bribery, forgery, and even murder. Once found, the masterpiece will disappear again without anyone ever knowing it surfaced and sold for billions of dollars of profit at a secret auction attended by only the wealthiest of the art world’s patrons.
-
-
I just could not finish this book
- By Jerry on 10-20-23
By: Jim Shockey
-
2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
-
-
The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
-
Fresh Water for Flowers
- By: Valérie Perrin
- Narrated by: Sara Young
- Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues - gravediggers, groundskeepers, and a priest - visit her to warm themselves in her lodge, where laughter, companionship, and occasional tears mix with the coffee she offers them. Her life is lived to the rhythms of their funny, moving confidences. But her routine is disrupted by the arrival of the local police chief, who insists on scattering the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger.
-
-
A great story, an appalling reading
- By C. Prunier on 06-22-21
By: Valérie Perrin
-
The Promise
- By: Damon Galgut
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
-
-
Excellent novel
- By ALG on 11-09-21
By: Damon Galgut
-
The Little Liar
- A Novel
- By: Mitch Albom
- Narrated by: Mitch Albom
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Eleven-year-old Nico Krispis has never told a lie. When the Nazis invade his home in Salonika, Greece, the trustworthy boy is discovered by a German officer, who offers him a chance to save his family. All Nico has to do is persuade his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading “north,” where new jobs and safety await. Unaware that this is all a cruel ruse, the innocent boy reassures passengers on the station platform every day.
-
-
Timeliness and timelessness
- By JStan on 02-25-24
By: Mitch Albom
-
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
-
-
Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Call Me Hunter
- A Novel
- By: Jim Shockey
- Narrated by: Scott Brick, Jim Shockey
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Once in a long while, a child is born possessing the rarest of gifts, the innate ability to feel impossible beauty, to recognize priceless works of art. When such a child is discovered, a 250-year-old secret organization called Our World trains them to acquire the greatest works of art through theft, bribery, forgery, and even murder. Once found, the masterpiece will disappear again without anyone ever knowing it surfaced and sold for billions of dollars of profit at a secret auction attended by only the wealthiest of the art world’s patrons.
-
-
I just could not finish this book
- By Jerry on 10-20-23
By: Jim Shockey
-
2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
-
-
The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
-
Fresh Water for Flowers
- By: Valérie Perrin
- Narrated by: Sara Young
- Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues - gravediggers, groundskeepers, and a priest - visit her to warm themselves in her lodge, where laughter, companionship, and occasional tears mix with the coffee she offers them. Her life is lived to the rhythms of their funny, moving confidences. But her routine is disrupted by the arrival of the local police chief, who insists on scattering the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger.
-
-
A great story, an appalling reading
- By C. Prunier on 06-22-21
By: Valérie Perrin
-
The Promise
- By: Damon Galgut
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
-
-
Excellent novel
- By ALG on 11-09-21
By: Damon Galgut
-
To Be a Man
- Stories
- By: Nicole Krauss
- Narrated by: Nicole Krauss
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.
-
-
The joy of great literature
- By Brian Datnow on 01-02-21
By: Nicole Krauss
-
The First Man
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The First Man, Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus's aesthetic powers and moral vision.
-
-
Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
-
What You Have Heard Is True
- A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
- By: Carolyn Forché
- Narrated by: Carolyn Forché
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman’s radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.
-
-
Beautiful story
- By Norhilda on 05-09-19
By: Carolyn Forché
-
House on Endless Waters
- A Novel
- By: Emuna Elon
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Renowned author Yoel Blum reluctantly agrees to visit his birthplace of Amsterdam to promote his books, despite promising his late mother that he would never return to that city. While touring the Jewish Historical Museum with his wife, Yoel stumbles upon footage portraying prewar Dutch Jewry and is astonished to see the youthful face of his beloved mother staring back at him, posing with his father, his older sister…and an infant he doesn’t recognize.
-
-
Interesting, worth the listen, but not great.
- By Npleaf on 02-11-20
By: Emuna Elon
-
The Good Assassin
- How a Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down the Butcher of Latvia
- By: Stephan Talty
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The untold story of an Israeli spy’s epic journey to bring the notorious Butcher of Latvia to justice - a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis.
-
-
Wonderful: A complete history wrapped in a story
- By Aaron on 04-22-20
By: Stephan Talty
-
Summer
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Juliette Burton
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Here is the exciting culmination of Ali Smith's celebrated Seasonal Quartet, a series of stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories.
-
-
terrific book, beautifully read.
- By Sasha on 02-07-21
By: Ali Smith
-
Making Wolf
- By: Tade Thompson
- Narrated by: Clifford Samuel
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Meet Weston Kogi, a London supermarket store detective. He returns home to his West African home country for his aunt's funeral. He sees his family, his ex-girlfriend Nana, his old school mate Church. Food is good, beer is plentiful and telling people he works as a homicide detective seems like harmless hyperbole, until he wakes up in hell. He is kidnapped and forced by two separate rebel factions to investigate the murder of a local hero, Papa Busi. The solution may tip a country on the brink into civil war.
-
-
A Pleasure When an Artist Does Not Repeat Himself
- By Audible Customer on 08-31-20
By: Tade Thompson
-
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A moving novel on the power of friendship in our darkest times, from internationally renowned writer and speaker Elif Shafak. In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating, but her brain is still active - for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life - and the lives of others, outcasts like her.
-
-
A word of caution before purchasing or listening
- By Esther V. Skandunas on 06-18-22
By: Elif Shafak
-
The Longest Echo
- A Novel
- By: Eoin Dempsey
- Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan, Will Damron
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Occupied Italy, 1944. In the mountain regions south of Bologna, Liliana Nicoletti’s family finds escaped POW James Foley behind German lines. Committed to the anti-Fascist cause, they deliver him to a powerful band of local partisans. But when the SS launches a brutal attack against the Resistance, Liliana’s community is destroyed. Forging an unbreakable bond, James and Liliana's only hope of survival is to make it to the Allied lines. Twelve years later, fate reunites Liliana, newly widowed, and James, now a journalist for a New York magazine.
-
-
Brilliant
- By Katherine on 02-20-21
By: Eoin Dempsey
-
Unholy Land
- By: Lavie Tidhar
- Narrated by: Andrew Fallaize
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When pulp-fiction writer Lior Tirosh returns to his homeland in East Africa, much has changed. Palestina - a Jewish state established in the early 20th century - is constructing a massive border wall to keep out African refugees. Unrest in the capital, Ararat, is at fever pitch. While searching for his missing niece, Tirosh begins to act as though he is a detective from one of his own novels. He is pursued by ruthless members of the state's security apparatus while unearthing deadly conspiracies and impossible realities.
-
-
Which reality is real?
- By Michael G Kurilla on 10-17-20
By: Lavie Tidhar
-
The Hotel Neversink
- By: Adam O'Fallon Price
- Narrated by: Steven Jay Cohen
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Thirty-one years after workers first broke ground, the magnificent Hotel Neversink in the Catskills finally opens to the public. Then a young boy disappears. This mysterious vanishing - and the ones that follow - will brand the lives of three generations. At the root of it all is Asher Sikorsky, the ambitious and ruthless patriarch whose purchase of the hotel in 1931 set a haunting legacy into motion.
-
-
A Depressing Book, Depressingly Read
- By Bob P. on 05-29-21
-
Children of the Land
- By: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man’s attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence. Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines, and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.
-
-
Phenomenal
- By Amelie on 07-18-20
Critic reviews
“[H]aunting and beautiful...Songs for the Flames is a book about war and imperialism, which in Vasquez’s view never really end, but rather mutate: devolving here into individual traumas paid out over generations, evolving there into state corruption and endless cycles of violence.... [A] book about secrets and lies, which is to say speech acts: their tremendous power, but also the limits of that power and the wretched ecstasy of revelation. Or recognition. Because discovering a secret is not the same as being told one, which is something else again from having a secret to protect.” (New York Times)
“Politics thread throughout this fiercely imagined collection as the Colombian master excavates the aftermath of violent upheaval, characters adrift in dread and wonder.... We’re shocked, shocked by the genius in his craft.” (Oprah Daily)
“The power of [the story] ‘Woman on the Riverbank’ comes from the author’s refusal to create easy drama, his insistence on loose ends taking on a power of their own, his belief that mystery holds a truth that lives beyond fact or beyond simple explanation.” (Electric Literature)