Curtis Bauer

Why is grass in airports so important? Can you be an extraordinary copyist without knowing how to read or write? Are there successful musicians who only play a single note in their life? Book after book, Fabio Morabito''s stories have become increasingly radical in their way of showing us that imagination is not a curious feature of the mind, but perhaps the only way to not feel excluded from the real world. With prose free of unnecessary explanation and descriptive embellishments, The Shadow of the Mammoth insists once again on the guiding principle of Morabito''s work: playing fair with the reader, who advances in reading these stories as he did when writing them, open to any direction they could take. For this reason, these stories are as unexpected as they are different from each other, all united by that pleasure of storytelling that has always been Morabito''s unmistakable hallmark.

A man travels to Lisbon ahead of his wife to prepare their newly purchased home, while she stays in New York to oversee a research project on the neuroscience of memory and fear. Leaving behind a phase of their relationship indelibly marked by 9/11, he revels in the Portuguese capital''s temperate weather and the neighbourhood''s calm, meticulously planning the details of their future. Yet beneath the peace and quiet of this routine, he feels a growing unease he can''t explain. Is it the similarity between the two cities, and the two apartments? A mysterious threat waiting in the wings? A brilliant, deceptively simple novel of psychological suspense, YOUR STEPS ON THE STAIRS explores how our emotions and memories shape our perception of reality. With his subtle, masterful style, Antonio Munoz Molina lays bare the fragility of the stories we so carefully craft about ourselves.