Miguel Ángel Hernández in conversation with Emma Bailey Leary at Bart’s Books
In this blend of police thriller and poignant autofiction translated from the Spanish, a writer revisits a tragic crime from his adolescence and reckons with a dark, underexplored side of Spain.
On Christmas Eve 1995, Miguel Ángel Hernández’s best friend murdered his sister and took his own life by jumping off a cliff. It happened in a small hamlet in the Murcia countryside. No one ever knew why. The investigation was closed, and the crime forgotten.
20 years later, when the wounds seem to have stopped bleeding and the mourning died down, Miguel decides to return to the countryside and, putting himself in the shoes of a detective, tries to reconstruct that tragic night that marked the end of his adolescence. But travelling in time always means altering the past, and the investigation will awaken ghosts that he thought he had left behind: a childhood marked by the Church, by sin and guilt; the constant presence of illness and death; the oppressive, closed world from which he managed to escape.
This raw, moving novel about the collision of two worlds and two ways of life is a reckoning with the past and, above all, a subtle and incisive meditation on the ethics of literature, which makes us aware that “writing isn’t always a triumph, that sometimes, we too may founder upon the pain of others.”
Miguel Ángel Hernández is a Spanish writer best known for his works of fiction, among them the novels Intento de escapada (2013), which won the Premio Ciudad Alcalá de Narrativa and was translated into five languages, El instante de peligro (2015), which was a finalist for the Premio Herralde de Novela, and El dolor de los demás (2018), which was selected as a book of the year by El País and the New York Times en Español. Hernández teaches art history at the University of Murcia and has authored several books on art and visual culture. His novel Anoxia was published by Other Press in 2025.
Emma Bailey Leary is a bookseller and host of the author event series at Bart’s Books.