Juan José Millás – författare

A dazzling follow-up to Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal.

‘We would love to discover that each species has a biological clock in its cells, because, if that clock existed and if we were able to find it, perhaps we could stop it and thus become eternal,’ Arsuaga tells Millás in this book, in which science is intertwined with literature. The paleontologist reveals essential aspects of our existence to the writer, and debates the advisability of transmitting his random vision of life to a dieting Millás, who discovers that old age is a country in which he still feels like a foreigner.

After the extraordinary international reception of Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal, the most brilliant double act in Spanish literature once again dazzle the reader by addressing topics such as death and eternity, longevity, disease, ageing, natural selection, programmed death, and survival.

Here you will find humour, biology, nature, life, a lot of life … and two fascinating characters, the Sapiens and the Neanderthal, who surprise us on every page with their sharp reflections on how evolution has treated us as a species. And also as individuals.

A New Scientist Book of the Year

Prehistory is all around us. We just need to know where to look.

Juan José Millás has always felt like he doesn’t quite fit into human society. Sometimes he wonders if he is even a Homo sapiens at all, or something simpler. Perhaps he is a Neanderthal who somehow survived? So he turns to Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the world’s leading palaeontologists and a super-smart sapiens, to explain why we are the way we are and where we come from.

Over the course of many months, the two visit different places, many of them common scenes of our daily lives, and others unique archaeological sites. Arsuaga tries to teach the Neanderthal how to think like a sapiens and, above all, that prehistory is not a thing of the past: that traces of humanity through the millennia can be found anywhere, from a cave or a landscape to a children’s playground or a toy shop.

Millás and Arsuaga invite you on a journey of wonder that unites scientific discovery with the greatest human invention of all: the art of storytelling.

Publishers Weekly “Top 10 Books of the Year” selection

From one of Spain’s most original authors comes a wild, absurdist story about a lonely man’s misguided attempts to connect

Laid off from his job, Damián Lobo obsessively imagines himself as a celebrity being interviewed on TV. After committing an act of petty theft at an antiques market, he finds himself trapped inside a wardrobe and delivered to the seemingly idyllic home of a husband, wife, and their internet-addicted teenage daughter. There, he sneaks from the shadows to serve as an invisible butler, becoming deeply and disastrously involved with his unknowing host family. Every thread of the plot is ingeniously tied together, creating a potent admixture of parable, love story, and thriller. Millás masterfully reveals the everyday as innately surreal as he renders the unbelievable tangible and the trivial fantastical, and full of dark humor.

An odyssey of operatic proportions, featuring an obsession-fueled taxi driver

After Lucía loses her job at an IT firm, she has a vision of her future career as a taxi driver, brought on by the intoxicating opera floating through her apartment’s air vent. She obtains her taxi license and meets the neighbor responsible for the music. Calaf is the man’s name, which also happens to be the name of the character in Puccini’s Turandot and the bird Lucía received on her tenth birthday from her long-since-dead mother. When he moves out of her building, Lucía becomes obsessed, driving through Madrid and searching for him on every corner, meeting intriguing people along the way. What follows is a phantasmagoria of coincidence, betrayal, and revenge, featuring Millás’s singular dark humor.

Let No One Sleep is a delirious novel in which the mundane and extraordinary collide, art revives and devastates, and identity is unhinged by the treacherous forces of contemporary society.