This is a story about two people, but I’m the only one telling it.

Many authors have wrestled with the death of a father in their writing, but few have grappled so fiercely or as powerfully as the brilliant Spanish writer Marcos Giralt Torrente does in FATHER AND SON, the mesmerizing and discomfiting memoir that won him Spain’s highest literary award, the National Book Award. Giralt Torrente is best known for his fiction --- which has only recently begun to appear in translation in the United States --- but it is in this often savage memoir that his full gifts explode.

When his father is diagnosed with cancer, the author is struck by the blunt force of it all. FATHER AND SON weaves in history and personal narrative to attempt to do justice to a relationship that the author finds difficult to reflect upon --- but one that he can’t escape. In the end, the reader is left with an account that is neither homage nor reckoning, but instead an indelible dual portrait of a father and his son.

FATHER AND SON is an uncommonly gripping memoir by an uncommonly talented international writer.