Your Steps on the Stairs
A Novel
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A couple's new life in Lisbon unravels in this heady and unsettling psychological thriller from one of Spain's most celebrated writers.
A man travels to Lisbon ahead of his wife to prepare their new home, while she stays in New York to oversee a research project on the neuroscience of memory and fear. Leaving behind a phase of their relationship indelibly marked by 9/11, the man revels in the Portuguese capital's temperate weather and the neighborhood's calmness, meticulously planning the details of their future.
Yet beneath the peace and quiet of this routine, he feels a growing unease he can't explain. Is it the similarity between the two cities, and the two apartments? A mysterious threat waiting in the wings?
A brilliant, deceptively simple novel of psychological suspense, Your Steps on the Stairs explores how our emotions and memories shape our perception of reality. With his subtle, masterful style, Antonio Muñoz Molina lays bare the fragility of the stories we so carefully craft about ourselves.
About this Author
Antonio Muñoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Sepharad, A Manuscript of Ashes, and In Her Absence. He has been awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society and the Prince of Asturias Award, among many others. Muñoz Molina lives in Madrid and New York City.
Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond's Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.
Reviews
"[A] disquieting psychological suspense novel...Anxiety and dread mount steadily, while elegiac prose and eccentric supporting characters amplify the story's surrealism straight through to the sucker-punch ending. It's a stunning blend of mystery and literary fever dream." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A masterly subtle trip into the mind of a man waiting for his wife amidst his apocalypse, Your Steps on the Stairs dissects the myriad distractions and deceits we cope with in this dystopic-modern world. In prose spun so expertly it leaves you daydreaming inside the elusive Lisbon and New York City of this novel, Muñoz Molina achieves a reverberant psychological unraveling that will suspend, overturn, and consume your optimism for reality." --Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming
Praise for In Her Absence:
"[An] elegant, precise, and inimitable novel...nothing less than extraordinary." --Washington Post
"Muñoz Molina layers a subtle satire of artistic hypocrisy with a stirring account of class separation." --The New Yorker
"In this gem of a novella, Antonio Muñoz Molina deftly chronicles the trajectory of a failing marriage." --San Francisco Chronicle
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