Aura García-Junco

In this hybrid auto-fictionalised novel, the ‘protagonist’ inherits approximately 10,000 books from her father, the eccentric teacher, underground writer and cultural promoter H. Pascal, after his death, and it is through her reconnection (or first connection) with this library that she investigates her (fractured) relationship with him and, furthermore, her relationship with literature, materiality, with society and with, of course, herself. Between gothic concerts in El Zócalo and fights over MeToo, this novel is “a seance during which you literarily re-live through the things that life forced you to bury.” An inherited library serves as the detonator of a voluntary shipwreck within a familial archaeology. Generational change, feminism and the tension it creates between fathers and daughters, inheritance, personal libraries, self-publishing and that which is 'peripheral' all parade through these pages that oscillate between distance, fury, happiness, humour and reconciliation.