A collection of dark, funny Iberian poems about drinking, sex and death. Manuel Vilas speaks in the voice of bitter experience, experience which seems intent on sending him up. He is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map and between romances. His instinct for rhythm gives the reader a firm sense of place and tone. Universal in their concerns, taking in love and the end of love, life and the end of life, the poems are also ...

A collection of dark, funny Iberian poems about drinking, sex and death.Manuel Vilas speaks in the voice of bitter experience, experience which seems intent on sending him up. He is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map and between romances. His instinct for rhythm gives the reader a firm sense of place and tone. Universal in their concerns, taking in love and the end of love, life and the end of l...

‘A book of deep reckoning’ New York Times‘Becomes a way of looking honestly at what mourning really feels like’ GuardianA man in tumult returns to Ordesa, the small mountain town where he was born, and where his parents have recently died. He sits down to write. Newly sober, his career on the wane, his relationship with his own children strained, what he produces is a dizzying chronicle of his childhood and an unsparing acc...