Killing the Nerve traces Anna Pazos’s restless journey from her native Barcelona across continents, blending memoir, reportage, and cultural commentary. Beginning with her departure from what she calls the “Mediterranean mediocrity” of her hometown, Pazos recounts formative experiences studying in Thessaloniki, reporting from Jerusalem, crossing the Atlantic with a flawed partner, and living in New York in the wake of #MeToo and on the cusp of the pandemic. Her return to Catalonia prompts a reckoning with personal identity, place, and belonging.

Written first in Catalan as Matar el nervi and now available in English from Foundry Editions, Pazos’s prose is precise, unsentimental, and sharply observant. She examines youth, ambition, and dislocation with the cool detachment of a reporter and the intimacy of a memoirist. The result is a clear-eyed, engaging account of a generation navigating freedom, uncertainty, and the search for meaning across shifting cultural and geographic landscapes.

Anna Pazos has immense life experience and Killing the Nerve is a curious exploration of her journeys - literal and metaphorical, personal and professional.
The writing is plain and objective, like a documentarist's.
I enjoyed Pazos' independence, observations and all of the beautiful places that serve as characters. Very close to my heart.

This is an exploration of Anna’s twenties, beginning with her Erasmus student days in Thessaloniki, continuing with her early working life in cities like Jerusalem and New York and ending on a brief meditation as to her Catalan family history.

The tone of this book is incredibly conversational and readable. I loved that Anna captures the atmosphere of each city and its people, religions, politics and daily life in a way that feels alive. There’s such a spirit of adventure that makes this book brim with life and honesty as it conveys the experience of an adrenaline filled life. Anna also doesn’t shy away from sharing her dating life with all its chaos and unpredictability, which initially caught me by surprise a little but particularly the descriptions of modern day dating in big cities are bound to feel relatable to many readers.

I recommend this book if you enjoy travel literature, easy going memoirs and more conversational books which also describe modern day relationships in their messiness and beauty. This is a memoir that doesn’t take itself too seriously!

Anna Pazos' Killing the Nerve is a powerful work of auto-journalism which conveys the disorienting, thrilling, and frequently painful process of transformation from impatient youth to tentative adulthood. With her sharp mind and unflinching candour, this first book walks the tightrope between the intimate and the political to present a picture not just of one woman's life, but of an entire generation seeking purpose across changing landscapes.

The writer transports readers from the comfortable rhythms of bourgeois Barcelona to the mayhem and freedom of Erasmus years in Thessaloniki, and then to the heat of early journalism in Jerusalem, and across the Atlantic on a madcap journey with a lover who was always meant to be fleeting. All chapters are an exploration of belonging, identity, and disillusionment, influenced by the cultural and political tumult of its era. By 2021, when the author comes back to Barcelona, she is looking inward to her family, to post-2017 Catalonia, and to the uncomfortable realities of becoming an adult.

Lyrical, incisive, and profoundly resonant, Killing the Nerve is not just memoir; it's a mirror of a generation. For fans of Deborah Levy or Rachel Cusk, this novel will hit like a revelation; restless, questioning, and indelible.

Killing the Nerve by Anna Pazos is a sharp, reflective and thought-provoking book that blurs the lines between memoir, journalism and cultural commentary. Through vivid personal storytelling, Pazos examines what it means to come of age in a restless, globalised generation that is constantly searching for meaning, freedom and identity.

The book follows her journey from Barcelona to Thessaloniki, Jerusalem, across the Atlantic and finally to New York, each place shaping her sense of self in different ways. Her writing is intelligent and unflinchingly honest, filled with striking observations about youth, womanhood and belonging. There is a real sense of movement and introspection as she explores both the outer world and her inner life.

Returning to Barcelona after years abroad brings the book full circle, as she confronts family, identity and the Catalan independence movement with clarity and emotional depth. The tone feels intimate yet journalistic, with moments of sharp humour and quiet melancholy.

A deeply personal and perceptive book about growing up, letting go and learning to see one’s home and self with new eyes. Thoughtful, stylish and beautifully written.

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