Overview

A nocturnal drift through the margins of Madrid—where lost souls cross paths with the surreal, and the city itself becomes a character. In this stark, luminous novel, Esther García Llovet returns to the shadows of the Spanish capital to trace the uneasy reunion of Nikki and Sánchez, two former lovers bound by shared history and mutual failure. She has returned from the borderlands of Gibraltar, where she dealt contraband. He, a man seemingly pursued by bad luck, accepts her offer out of desperation: help deliver a greyhound named Cromwell to a woman deep in the racing underworld. What follows is a long night’s descent through a Madrid untouched by tourism or nostalgia—a landscape of bingo halls, half-lit highways, silent gas stations, and after-hours bars that seem suspended in time. Here, even the fantastical feels plausible: a performance artist devours raw deer meat in the forest, while unspoken debts and spectral memories surface with the clarity only darkness allows. With clipped, exacting prose and dialogue that cuts like broken glass, García Llovet sketches a world that is both brutal and strangely tender—a Madrid of the mind, where the borders between absurdity, danger, and beauty dissolve. A singular voice in contemporary Spanish fiction, Sánchez confirms García Llovet as a master chronicler of urban estrangement and nocturnal grace.

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9781917544009

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Esther García Llovet was born in Málaga in 1963. She moved to Madrid in 1970 to study clinical psychology and film direction, and she has lived there ever since. She started writing in 2000 and has written eight novels, including the three novels of her acclaimed Snapshot Trilogy of Madrid (Anagrama). Sánchez is the first episode of her new Trilogy of the Spanish Levant. Her works have achieved critical success and cult status for their intense, cinematic style and offbeat Chandleresque realism. García Llovet writes for several different cultural anthologies and periodicals, is a translator from English and a well-respected photographer. Her novel Spanish Beauty was published by Foundry Editions in 2025.

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