Aphasia
'Monumental, funny, potent, and fresh' Carlos Fonseca, author of Natural History
Antonio is living a double life – and doing a pretty good job of it. By day he's Antonio, mild-mannered database analyst, recent divorcé and father of two. In private, however, he spends hours on seedy pick-up websites or combing fiction and film for the solutions to his problems.
And then, Antonio's sister goes missing.
Her disappearance forces Antonio to confront not only his own troubled past, but his mother's decision to leave Colombia with two young children in tow, his ex-wife's obsessive, unhappy relationship with her homeland and, ultimately, the reason for his sister's despair.
Propulsive and freewheeling, bold and hilarious, Mauro Javier Cárdenas' second novel is a daring examination of identity in a world that seems determined to fragment us.
Mauro Javier Cárdenas was born and brought up in Guayaquil, Ecuador and studied Economics at Stanford University. His debut novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, was published in 2016. He was awarded the 2016 Joseph Henry Jackson Award and was included in the Hay Festival anthology Bogotá39: New Voices from Latin America (Oneworld, 2018), a selection of the best young Latin American novelists working today.