An atmospheric and unsettling novel that gives voice to the forgotten living on the margins, this is the chronicle of Matías Kovac, a sixteen-year-old apathetic and marginalized boy who needs to break out of himself. The path forward seems to lie in the diaries left behind by his brother Cristian, who has fled to Barcelona. Kurt Cobain, Nick Cave, Suede, and Patti Smith form a kind of sacred text Matías is determined to decipher. Published in 2004 after the Argentine economic crisis, the novel draws on the social breakdown and widespread pessimism of the time to portray the fragility of family structures and how easily they can be shattered. Matías’s father abandoned the family under the influence of evangelical preachers, his mother is bedridden and sedated by sleeping pills, and his sister Carla hides her face behind a balaclava after a failed suicide attempt. Barcelona becomes his personal Ithaca, the only possible escape, a journey that truly begins when a large package of cocaine falls into his hands—triggering a violent, hallucinatory odyssey through the neglected, ghostlike suburb where he lives.