“A truly stunning work with a beautiful stillness to it, very few potential translation issues, and which deserves to be in as many languages as possible. “(Rosalind Harvey)

'Every childhood has a way out. In every childhood there are moments or episodes - now generous, now protracted, now brief and fleeting - that are like narrow porticos leading to the greatness of the future. We step innocently through them, full of energy and curiosity, without being able to comprehend, of course, that these tentative babysteps are irrevocable, and there's no way back. I sometimes think that this is why I write. To try to return to my childhood in the turbulent Guatemala of the 1970s. To dip my pen in the inkwell of my childhood memory until I find the moments and episodes there which were my way out. To retrace my child's steps and walk once more through those narrow porticos and perhaps now, in this way, in a handful of pages, and through the hazy prism of memory and fiction, recover flashes of my own paradise lost.'