Institut Ramon LLull

One night, suddenly, inexplicably, a gleam emerged from the Factory and night became day, as if bleached tablecloths were hung everywhere, blocking the heavens. Those who approached it burned their eyes, and when darkness again swallowed the light, the Factory glowed phosphorescent. The narrator’s mother returns from her job at the Factory, but offers him no answers and little guidance. When we meet him, he is navigating the recent aftermath, nine hundred days later and in media res, a devastating world where it is not easy to distinguish victims from executioners.

This suffocating postapocalyptic universe that Guasch creates in a mosaic of short chapters — with an ambiguous location where the past, present, and future converge — is told in precise and poetic prose, and refuses to offer readers any consolation. The narrator’s epistolary relationship with Boris reveals the shared language that is their home, the language of the heart, a threatened language, which cannot lie, even in the face of no future.