Nightfall

The unexplained disappearance in flight of a Malaysian Airlines aircraft early on the morning of 8 March 2014 provides the starting-point of Nightfall, a gripping novel full of suspense that also takes us back in time to the disappearance half a century earlier of flight HK367 in the jungle in Colombia’s Vaupés region. The plot is driven by a suspicion that the protagonist’s son might have been a passenger on the Malaysian Airlines flight, and by questions as to why he might have been travelling under another name. There is also reason to think he might have wanted to travel to Colombia to search for his mother and find out about his birth and early childhood in the midst of the country’s armed conflict in which his father had played a major role. With cinematic speed, the novel takes us through a whirlwind of contemporary world events and offers insights into situations that Colombia has had to confront in recent times. Ambition and the thirst for power, frustrated love and disappointed hopes, violence and uncertainty accompany us as we travel to different parts of the planet, forcing us to reflect on society today and the pressing, dramatic problems it faces.

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“In our world of plotting, manipulation and corruption, Nightfall is a courageous novel whose deep ethical roots lead not to moral or political preaching, but rather to holding up mirrors in which we are invited to scrutinise ourselves”. Francisco Gutiérrez Carbajo

“With this complex, gripping plot, Roberto Gil de Mares has confirmed his standing as one of the great Latin-American narrators of our time”. Jorge Aristizábal Gáfaro

“Quite simply, a great, hugely significant novel”. Carlos Vásquez-Zawadzki

“Few writers have described the Colombian conflict of recent years, in the context of the wider world order, as incisively as Roberto Gil de Mares does here. A century after La Vorágine, this novel can be seen as its sequel in our time”. Richard Alvin