An unsettlingly entertaining novel about pets, grief, ghostly apparitions, and the desire for company.

With her hands trembling from tears and shock, Elizabeth Jameson leaves her cat’s pristine corpse on the kitchen table of her tenant, Rita, who is also a doctoral student of her son Florian. The animal, named Douglas, had lost the last of its nine lives the previous night and had been found the next morning buried in an improvised grave in the yard where the roses were supposed to be.

However, that morning, after a pilgrimage to the supermarket to return the food her pet was never going to eat, Elizabeth had found her cat at her front door, no dirt or grime in sight. Rita consoles her, overcome with guilt because she knows her dog Kurt is to blame and that this crime might cost her a place to live and her future. “Sometimes, love is so profound that it simply cannot be buried,” she tells her. And Elizabeth decides to believe this.

That lie, hardly a merciful one, will be what triggers a powder keg of resentments and hidden desires that envelop the elderly woman and her young tenant: those that concern a son who blames his mother for his father’s death and for the horseback riding accident that left him with a limp; those of a daughter-in-law in an unhappy marriage who covets her house; those of a pair of spoiled grandchildren whose love can be bought, though not for long. And above all, it will be the descent into madness of two women with an instrumental attachment and ambitions that are as lofty as they are fantastical, as they flee past improvable pasts toward chimerical futures.

Under this premise that oscillates between the vaudeville and a ghost story in the purest style of Henry James, Los idolatras y todos los que aman unravels a microcosm of unfathomable misunderstandings, a scenario where all the characters come together and grow apart, so immersed in their own machinations that they lack the time or energy to recognize their mutual humanity. Adriana Murad Konings surprises us with a one-of-a-kind novel in which the grief over the death of a pet opens the doors to a chaotic universe—one with comedy worthy of Muriel Sparks—that is addictive and full of emotion.

“Codependency, family, dogs and cats, impostures, grief, emotional deficit and displacement, houses with gardens, elderly landladies and young tenants who keep certain secrets. A unique and extremely intelligent novel, written with the phlegm and elegance of that English humor that, with restrained expressions and educated prose, demonstrates the wildest side of our instincts and our civilization.” —Marta Sanz

“An intelligent and sharp voice that goes in and out of its characters voices with literary mastery, much like a tea bag enters boiling water in order to change the color and flavor of its contents. One leaves this book feeling overwhelmed, marveled, shaken, without knowing what is or isn’t real, without knowing what’s right or what’s wrong. And I don’t care or want to know. Those sick of literalism, cure yourselves with this book!” —Juanpe Sánchez López