Fin

Autor: David Monteagudo
Translation Rights: Quaderns Crema

A group of friends spend the night in an abandoned castle on a remote mountain-top somewhere in Spain. They swear an oath that, wherever they are, whatever life throws at them, they will return, on the same night, in twenty-five years time.

Twenty-five years later… the oath is long forgotten. The friends have gone their separate ways. But then each in turn gets a phone call inviting them to the reunion as one member of the group holds the others to their promise.

They haven’t seen each other for years: three men, three women and their partners. There’s one happy couple, one unhappy couple, one frustrated writer, one wealthy businessman, a single woman, a divorcee… and a secret that unites the group in their unwillingness to talk about it: what happened to Andrés, known as ‘The Prophet’. It was the practical joke they played on him all those years ago and which went badly wrong that split the group of friends and sent them their separate ways. Now, the organizer has promised that The Prophet will share their party at the mountain farmhouse where they will spend their reunion and try to forgive each other. But there is no sign of him, and then, just as the old friends are returning to type, drifting into their old patterns of jokes as they pass the wine and find out what each has been doing with their lives, there is a power cut. Is it the Prophet, come to take his revenge? They try to leave by car, but the cars won’t start. Has there been some kind of electromagnetic event? No electronic devices seem to be working....

The next morning they set off on foot to find help. But the tents of the climbers at the foot of the mountain have been abandoned, together with their expensive equipment. The nearest house on the road is deserted, but seems to have been evacuated in hurry. To add to their problems, one by one, members of the group start vanishing.

This is a haunting literary sci-fi thriller from first-time novelist novelist David Monteagudo, author of this bestselling sensation of Spanish fiction that will take you on a journey into the lives of a group of ordinary Spanish forty-somethings who must confront the ultimate challenge and face their destiny in a story reminiscent of The Seventh Seal, Z for Zachariah, The Day of the Triffids... An apocalyptic page-turner from start to end, but one you might wish you could forget, because you won’t be able to. Perhaps the best début novel in Spanish since Albert Sánchez Piñol’s Cold Skin.

This is a summary of the reader’s report by Alex Ibartz