Laura Restrepo

You’d suppose a writer has to be pretty damn good, not to mention lucky, to warrant dust-jacket blurbs from not one but two Nobel laureates. The U.S. publication of Laura Restrepo’s Delirium carries ringing endorsements from José Saramago and Latin American luminary Gabriel García Márquez, and also comes on the heels of a slew of international awards and acclaim. The story of an unemployed professor of literature who has been reduced to selling dog food for a living—how’s that for metaphor?—and is trying to pinpoint the origins of his wife’s sudden and mysterious descent into madness, Delirium is a literary mystery steeped in the crime and corruption of modern-day Colombia. Saramago has called it “one of the finest novels written in recent memory.”