2023 Herralde Novel Prize

Nine strangers escape from bombings in a hot air balloon. They must decide which one of them has to jump into the ocean so that the rest of them can get to a deserted island safely and start a new civilization. The passengers are the only survivors of a worldwide war that has made the world we know disappear. What is at stake, in reality, isn’t the future of the human species, but a temporary job as a salesman in a large department store.

“That’s what the job search was like in 2011,” Carlos, the novel’s narrator could write. He tries to rescue the world he lived in from an uncertain future alongside other close and complicit voices; a world that “we can’t return to for reasons that we know all too well.” From this enigmatic exile, the narrator traces the dark, subterranean currents that transformed the lives of every person he knew, taking them so far away, through memories that appear to be anecdotal.

Although the first quarter of the 21^st century seems to be irrecoverable, by narrating it and telling the story again like fiction, Carlos might be able to decipher and rediscover—as his older brother’s increasingly fantastical and delirious emails remind him—the keys to a time period that seemed to be immune to fables and adventure, where the only kind of fiction that was tolerated was the kind that allowed people to fight for a shitty job.

Luis López Carrasco has written an exceptional novel about a generation seen from a foreign space and time period; about characters who inhabit a strange territory that drives them to confront what they were and what they are. In that back and forth that makes up memory, its protagonists will attempt to reconstruct, and, therefore, understand the invisible renunciations, the necessary alliances, and the unforeseen shapes of utopia.