Javier Cercas

A hilarious coming-of-age novel in which nobody learns anything.

Tomás has meticulously planned out his future: his wife is pregnant with their first child and he can look forward to a promising yet ultimately conventional academic career as a university professor of literature. But one afternoon, while his wife is attending a conference out of town, Tomás happens to run into Claudia in a Barcelona cinema, a girl he had a crush on in his teens. That night, they begin an on-and-off affair fraught with tension and misunderstandings.

Torn between a passionate relationship and a stable one, Tomás watches his future plans begin to crumble and has no choice but to live in the present, like a hero in a novel, while everything seems to fall apart all around him. In The Belly of the Whale, Javier Cercas spins out a brilliant tragicomedy about modern-day confusion, the weight of decisions and the ironies of love.

“In The Belly of the Whale, Cercas recreated the atmosphere of the Autonomous University of Barcelona and some corners of the city itself, such as the Oxford bar on Muntaner Street, where the great figures of the Department of Philology used to sip their whiskies.” Sergio Vila-Sanjuán

“Cercas’s writing has echoes of Scott Fitzgerald, in the intense, shining clarity of its emotion, and of Faulkner.” The Independent

“A masterful storyteller.” J.M. Coetzee