The All Saints' Day Lovers — Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Achingly sad and beautifully crafted, The All Saints' Day Lovers is a remarkable and intense exploration of relationships, loneliness, and cruelty. Set mainly in the starkly beautiful landscape of Belgium's Ardennes, these stories have been compared to Maupassant, Chekhov, John Cheever, and Antonio Tabucchi.

A Colombian writer is witness to a murder that will mark him forever. A woman sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return, while he lies in another woman's bed 20 kilometers away. Through blood-soaked betrayal, a love affair, murder, and long-meditated revenge, Vasquez achieves an extraordinary unity of emotion, morality, and landscape with these fragmented lives.