A night in the outskirts of Madrid—gambling and bingos, gas stations and bars in the middle of nowhere. A starkly real Madrid in which suddenly the unexpected, even the magical, can happen. This is the backdrop for the characters of this novel, losers in the search of an opportunity.

Their names are Nikki and Sánchez. The shared a life together in the past but now they are separated. She has been dealing in tobacco in the South and now has come back to Madrid and where she has entered the world of gambling and greyhound races. He is famous for being a jinx and someone who is inclined to disappear. He owes some money he agrees to help Nikki when she comes asking. Nikki asks Sánchez to help her to deliver a greyhound called Cromwell to an Italian woman who is in the racing business. Over the course of an endless night the couple will make its way through a spectral Madrid as they search for this greyhound and meet a cast of odd characters, such as the Serbian artist who has just put on a performance that consists of eating raw meat in the middle of a forest for 24 hours…

In this novel Esther García Llovet confirms herself as a brilliant portraitist of the Madrid you won’t find in the tourist guides, of the marginal city, late at night and filled with disturbing characters. A short and blunt novel filled with sharp dialogues, that moves forward relentlessly with the structure of a thriller in which from time to time a surreal climate sticks out, with images and situations worthy of a David Lynch in a state of grace.

“Esther García Llovet is a rara avis… The author questions every code, every image, every word… Wonderful.” – Marta Sanz

“We like García Llovet a lot, we like her style, her poetics. As a novelist she opts for short and allusive novels. Her narrative universe has an undeniable dose of strangeness encouraged by a kind of inaccessible arcane, of a Greek tragedy fatum. A cult author. – Sara Mesa