The American debut of a highly acclaimed Spanish writer: a sly, acerbic novel about love—or the end of love—and how hard it can be to let go.

There’s a lot about Joan-Marc that his second wife doesn’t know—and that he now sets out to tell her, come what may. He begins with his disastrous first marriage to an American named Helen, and the vacation they took in a last-ditch attempt to save their relationship. From there Joan-Marc unfurls the story of his life, from early memories of adolescence to a reckoning with mortality in his forties: friendships he abandoned, women he wronged, the wide swathe he cut across polite society in Madrid and Barcelona. Joan-Marc may be the kind of man we love to hate, yet his caustic wit, nostalgia, and self-pity are ultimately as winning as they are devastating.

Here is an audacious new voice, an unapologetic portrait of an antihero navigating the perilous shoals of modern life—a man struggling with long-held illusions about the inexorable forward march of time.