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An odyssey of operatic proportions, featuring an obsession-fueled taxi driver
After Lucía loses her job at an IT firm, she has a vision of her future career as a taxi driver, brought on by the intoxicating opera floating through her apartment’s air vent. She obtains her taxi license and meets the neighbor responsible for the music. Calaf is the man’s name, which also happens to be the name of the character in Puccini’s Turandot and the bird Lucía received on her tenth birthday from her long-since-dead mother. When he moves out of her building, Lucía becomes obsessed, driving through Madrid and searching for him on every corner, meeting intriguing people along the way. What follows is a phantasmagoria of coincidence, betrayal, and revenge, featuring Millás’s singular dark humor.
Let No One Sleep is a delirious novel in which the mundane and extraordinary collide, art revives and devastates, and identity is unhinged by the treacherous forces of contemporary society.
Big Other Book Award Finalist
“Deftly blurs the line between reality and the absurd. . . . Coincidences are plentiful and may remind American readers of Paul Auster’s mode. Millás tips his cap to his Latin American literary cousins in his fantastical denouement in which he returns to a scene akin to the punishment of Prometheus.” —On the Seawall
“Continuously surprising and entertaining, offhandedly funny and deconstructive of many forms of social preposterousness.” —North of Oxford
“Wonderfully absurd.” —Litro Magazine
“Nicely layered and twisted.” —Complete Review
“Everything impresses in this darkly iridescent, utterly captivating flight.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Masterly. . . . A disquieting fantasy of the Kafkian variety.” —Library Journal
“Memorable. . . . A strange and often transgressive exploration of art and intimacy.” —Kirkus Reviews
Juan José Millás is the recipient of Spain’s most prestigious literary prizes: the Premio Nadal, Premio Planeta, and Premio Nacional de Narrativa. He is the author of several short story collections and works of nonfiction as well as over a dozen novels, including two published in North America: Let No One Sleep and From the Shadows, a Publishers Weekly “Top 10 Book of the Year.” A regular contributor to El País, Millás has also won many awards for his journalism. He lives in Madrid.