New Spanish Titles - Autumn 2009 - E

Noel Villalta apparently has everything: love, money, social standing, friends… but despite this he can’t help feeling that something is missing. He can’t find himself. Sick of the way his life is going, he starts to commit seemingly senseless acts, even at risk to his own life. During one of these, Noel suffers a serious motorbike accident and loses his hand and forearm.

Gil Baleares doesn’t have much going on in his life: a kidnapped father suffering from Alzheimer, a daughter who is perhaps not his own, a divorce, forty years of existence marked by alcohol, frustration and defeat, and a lot of memories from the time when he was a federal investigations agent in legendary Mexico City.

The staircase, that complex fold, belongs to the system of architectural treatises as well as to that of manuals. The staircase responds to all of them, but also escapes them all, with a position of its own in the architectural process.

El que apaga la luz, title taken from one of Somerset Maugham’s sentences, is a book full of incurable patients, obsessions that culminate in the worst of nightmares (insomnia) and whose only relief is suicide. Characters tormented by evil deeds of which they cannot repent, who try to find answers to justify their deeds but find only angst and uncertainty.