Being economical with the truth allows a photographer to understand something of which she would have preferred to have remained ignorant. A chance meeting at a regimental reunion obliges a veteran of the Korean War to confront his past. A walk-on part in a Polanski film finds the narrator searching the director's face for signs of the aftermath of Sharon Tate's murder. The internet search for a book published in 1887, leads a writer to discover the life of a passionate woman.The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence - sometimes directly, sometimes only tangentially - but whose lives are changed forever by an unexpected encounter or by the operation of incomprehensible forces. Sixteen years after his first collection, Juan Gabriel V squez returns to the form with an outstanding set of nine morally complex stories, fresh proof of his narrative versatility and his profound understanding of the lives of others.
