Translation Rights TQE / That Which Is Left Unwritten

Carlos, a divorced father, picks up his fourteen year-old son Jorge to leave on a weekend trip to the mountain and, as if by mistake, leaves the manuscript of his recently finished novel to his ex-wife, Carmen. The reading of the manuscript, a crime fiction novel about extortion, will be very revealing to her about the intentions of her ex-husband. Meanwhile, Carlos must overcome a communication problem with his son, a panicky adolescent. Carmen becomes more and more frightful and anxious about what may be going on in the mountain… Or is it the reading of the manuscript that is provoking these feelings? “In living with someone, as in writing, one reveals himself,” thinks one of the characters. In reading too, when we interpret that which is left unwritten.

The novel brings together the resentment of amorous relationships, the unsettling nature of the mountain and the woods, and parental guilt and its reflection in adolescents. It is shaped as a psychological thriller where the winding paths of reading and the projection of our own fears create a horror plot constructed from different perspectives.

Rafael Reig was born in Cangas de Onís (Asturias, Spain) in 1963. He spent his childhood in Colombia and studied Philosophy and Literature at Madrid’s Autonoma University. He gave literature classes in New York, where he received his doctorate degree, and in several American universities. He currently teaches at the Hotel Kafka, a school of creative writing in Madrid, and is a contributor to several publications, both in digital and paper formats. From among his novels, Sangre a borbotones (Blood on the Saddle, 2002) was awarded the Critics’ Prize in Asturias and was chosen by the Lara Foundation as one of the five best novels written in Spanish in 2002, and his previous novel, Todo está perdonado (All Is Forgiven, 2011), was awarded the VI Tusquets Editores Prize for Novel 2010.