The day I leave I won't tell anyone

Julián is a professional loser. Congenitally unproductive, he passes his time accumulating records and books, occasionally working in a second-hand bookshop and spending his evenings in the same bar every night. His only refuge from this crushing normality is retreat to a parallel world where the piles of records on his bedroom floor represent the only unshakeable truth in his world. Octavia, whose job consists of recording messages for endless answering machines and public transport information services, has just broken up from her boyfriend and is entering into a spider’s web of ennui. Together, Julián and Octavia decide to escape from Barcelona and live out their own road movie to the soundtrack of some of history’s greatest songs. A book, a tape and a chance meeting are destined to change, at least for the instant they are with us, the lives of this book’s protagonists. In this thrilling novel, Kiko Amat mixes a cocktail of humour and emotions with a vertiginous, straightforward and simple prose that drinks lustily from the fountain of the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition of writers like Richard Brautigan and Colin McInnes, constructing a subterranean world that hums with the nervous intensity of a classic pop song.