Oblivion is a heart-rending but never sentimental memorial to the author's father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a left-wing activist who was murdered by paramilitaries in 1987. Twenty years in the writing, it paints an unforgettable picture of a man who followed his conscience and paid for it with his life, during one of the darkest periods in Latin America's recent history. Oblivion has been translated into fifteen languages. It topped the bestseller lists in Colombia for months, and has won the country's most prestigious literary prizes. It is an extraordinarily powerful, elegant and moving story. AUTHOR: Héctor Abad Faciolince is one of Colombia's leading writers. Born in 1958, Abad grew up in Medellín, where he studied medicine, philosophy and journalism. After being expelled from university for writing a defamatory text against the Pope, he moved to Italy, before returning to his homeland in 1987. SELLING POINTS: ? Author visit to include Cheltenham Festival and national radio ? Widespread review and other media coverage ? Translator Anne McLean has twice won the Foreign Fiction Prize REVIEWS: ?It's very difficult to summarize Oblivion without betraying it, because, like all great works, it is many things at once. To say that it is a heartrending memoir of the author's family and father ? who was murdered by a hired assassin ? is true, but paltry and infinitesimal, because the book is also a moving immersion into the inferno of Colombian political violence, into the life and soul of the city of Medellín, into the private life and public courage of a family, a true story that is also a superb fiction due to the way it's written and constructed, and one of the most eloquent arguments that has been written in our time or any time against terror as an instrument of political action.' - MARIO VARGAS LLOSA ?A tremendous and necessary book, devastatingly courageous and honest. At times I wondered how he was brave enough to write it.' - JAVIER CERCAS ?A beautiful and profoundly moving work ... an irreplaceable testimony of the struggle for democracy and tolerance in Latin America' - EL PAIS
