Critiques en avant-premièreThomas Bunstead

An odyssey of operatic proportions, featuring an obsession-fueled taxi driver

After Lucía loses her job at an IT firm, she has a vision of her future career as a taxi driver, brought on by the intoxicating opera floating through her apartment’s air vent. She obtains her taxi license and meets the neighbor responsible for the music. Calaf is the man’s name, which also happens to be the name of the character in Puccini’s Turandot and the bird Lucía received on her tenth birthday from her long-since-dead mother. When he moves out of her building, Lucía becomes obsessed, driving through Madrid and searching for him on every corner, meeting intriguing people along the way. What follows is a phantasmagoria of coincidence, betrayal, and revenge, featuring Millás’s singular dark humor.

“Wildly carnal. . . . Everything impresses in this darkly iridescent, utterly captivating flight.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Masterly... A disquieting fantasy of the Kafkian variety.” —Library Journal

“Memorable... A strange and often transgressive exploration of art and intimacy.” —Kirkus Reviews

From one of Spain’s most original authors comes a wild, absurdist story about a lonely man’s misguided attempts to connect “Part surreal comedy, part dark parable, Millás’s wild work brings readers face to face with the mundane facets of middle-class suburban life. . . . A page-turner of the strangest order, Millás’s debut stuns and entrances. It’s impossible to put down.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Laid off from his job, Damián Lobo obsessively imagines himself as a celebrity being interviewed on TV. After committing an act of petty theft at an antiques market, he finds himself trapped inside a wardrobe and delivered to the seemingly idyllic home of a husband, wife, and their internet-addicted teenage daughter. There, he sneaks from the shadows to serve as an invisible butler, becoming deeply and disastrously involved with his unknowing host family. Every thread of the plot is ingeniously tied together, creating a potent admixture of parable, love story, and thriller. Millás masterfully reveals the everyday as innately surreal as he renders the unbelievable tangible and the trivial fantastical, and full of dark humor.

The English-language debut of a major Latin American writer The Polish Boxer is a semi-autobiographical tale about roots and origins: the subtly subversive longing for lost identity, the emotionally treacherous territory of cultural exile, and the lingering legacy of history’s atrocities. As the narrator—a Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfon—travels from small Mayan villages to a Scottish bar in Antigua, and from a Mark Twain conference in North Carolina through the memories of his Polish grandfather’s nightmare at Auschwitz and to a Gypsy neighborhood in Serbia, he encounters people whose stories are as rich and diverse as the languages they speak. PRAISE “Eduardo Halfon’s prose is as delicate, precise, and ineffable as precocious art—a lighthouse that illuminates everything.” —Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name “These are the stories of life . . . the question of survival (of both people and cultures) and the way the fictional makes the real bearable and intelligible.” —Publishers Weekly, (boxed review)