Santiago Gamboa is one of Colombia’s most exciting writers. In the manner of Roberto Bolaño, Gamboa infuses his kaleidoscopic, cosmopolitan stories with a dose of inky dark noir that makes his novels intensely readable, his characters unforgettable, and his style influential.

Return to the Dark Valley tells the stories of four immigrants united by their need to return to their place of origin and exact vengeance. Manuela Beltrán, a woman haunted by a troubled childhood she tries to escape through books and poetry; Tertuliano, an Argentine preacher who claims to be the Pope’s son, ready to resort to extreme methods to create a harmonious society; Ferdinand Palacios, a Colombian priest with a dark paramilitary past now confronted with his guilt; Rimbaud, the precocious, brilliant poet whose life was incessant exploration; Juana and the consul, central characters in Gamboa’s Night Prayers, who are united in a relationship based equally on hurt and need. These characters animate Gamboa’s richly imagined portrait of a turbulent world where liberation is found in perpetual movement and determined exploration.

Santiago Gamboa
Santiago Gamboa is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist born in Colombia. His English language debut Necropolis, published by Europa Editions in 2012, won the Otra Orilla Literary Prize. He is also the author of Night Prayers (Europa Editions, 2016) and Return to the Dark Valley (Europa Editions, 2018).

• May 16 2018
  TO THE MAX Maxim Jakubowksi on New Crime
  — Crime Time
• Jan 21 2018
  Return to the Dark Valley
  — Qunfuz
• Nov 18 2017
  To the max New Crime fiction
  — Crimetime
• Oct 2 2017
  Return To The Dark Valley: Santiago Gamboa Interviewed
  — The Quietus
• Sep 7 2017
  Top World Fiction for Fall
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• Sep 4 2017
  Book Haul / Exciting New Books Published in September 2017
  — Eric Anderson - Youtube