Tomás Downey’s long-awaited third book of short stories is a masterful exploration of the uncanny and the intimate.

These narratives recalibrate the coordinates of time and space, transporting readers into a world that seems familiar yet quietly dislocated.

What happens when two young cousins in the Delta discover they are not truly related? Can a vocational school teach us to be better people? What would we do if given the power to bring a dead child back to life? Could humans themselves become pets?

Downey offers no simple answers. Each story, expanding at times into a novella, confronts profound questions while revealing that what defines a time and place is never just what we see or know.

With eloquence, precision, and a magnetic imagination, this short story collection opens subtle cracks in reality, where the strange, the tender, and the unsettling coexist in haunting harmony.

 

“Tomás Downey always surprises with a dazzling imagination, with his ability to create miniature worlds (as maddening and solid as this one), with his power of observation, with a style of writing that is economical yet ambiguous and unsettling, and with his exploration of what we are and how we relate to one another. This is a book about possible futures or possible ways of reading the present—all of them disturbing and desolate, yet completely truthful.” – Luciano Lamberti

 

208 pages – Original edition: Spanish (Fiordo, Argentina, 2021). Foreign editions: Italian (gran Via, 2026)