Manuel Vilas

“At the age of sixty-two, I'm facing the second major breakup of my life.”

 “I'm not in love with you anymore.” With this simple sentence, pronounced phlegmatically and calmly by the woman he loves, Manuel Vilas finds his life suddenly collapsing into a bottomless pit.

 She is also a writer, the winner of several prestigious awards in Spain and with a successful academic career in the United States under her belt. When they first met twelve years earlier, they didn't get on. The second time they met, at a literary fair in Miami, they completely fell for each other. Was she the love of his life? Undoubtedly. Was it a perfect relationship? Not at all. The class differences – she was from a wealthy family and had no financial worries, the minor domestic squabbles and the constant reproaches emerge in this story with the heartrending poignancy of the best songs about lost love.

 The couple has one last trip together lying ahead of them, one of the many they've taken, whose high cost has already been covered. They had paid for it before breaking up: a cruise around icy Iceland that will now seal the end of the relationship.

 Laced with fiendish humour and admirable self-irony, Manuel Vilas’ latest book reveals the inner workings of a relationship as happy as it is complex, as well as the spiralling vertigo of powerlessness and loneliness, the possibility of never falling madly and happily in love again after sixty.