Julián Ríos

Mortes is a merchant who arrives in the remote town of Tamoga, on the frontier with Portugal, with the intention of ending his days. Mortes has a past from which he wants to flee, but he is not the only inhabitant of the town in that situation. In Tamoga everyone seems to be hiding a death, a love, an act of revenge, a family grudge. For all of them Tamoga is the place where they can disappear, where they can bury themselves in life, where they can become shadows. Tamoga, which shelters all these lives on the borderline, is yet one more character in the novel, in the same way as Macondo or Comala, a symbol of an entire country and an entire era.

An impressive literary tour de force that condenses all the qualities that have made Julián Ríos one of the most dazzling and disturbing writers of contemporary Spanish narrative.