Hailed by Spain's Revista Quimera as one of the top ten Spanish-language novels of the decade, alongside Bolaño's , Vila-Matas's , and Marías's is a many-layered puzzle concerning an old screenwriter who has holed up in a shabby hotel in a never-named but familiar city in order to write a script about his lover — a young piano prodigy who wants in turn to give up music and become a novelist, and who believes she may be in contact with creatures from another world. Ambition, lust, hate, and the need to create all combine to make up a potent depiction of youth — and age — lost in a labyrinth of their own making.
Sinister and erotic, shifting restlessly between realities, and populated by conspirators both real and imagined, is an investigation of the limits of language, storytelling, and the known world, set against a backdrop of empty concert halls and hazy foosball bars. It is the first of A. G. Porta's books to appear in English, finally joining those of his early writing partner and devotee Roberto Bolaño.