Everything Fades Away (“Todo se desvanece”) tells the story of Samuel Estigarribia, a filmmaker once acclaimed by critics, who is now caught between romantic abandonment and creative exhaustion. L, the woman he loved, has left; the screenplay he is supposed to be writing barely exists; his flat, stripped of furniture and warmth, serves as the physical extension of a mind unable to move forward. Samuel witnesses the collapse of the version of himself he still wanted to believe in.

His routine is disrupted when Carmen, his sister, asks him to take in their father following a disturbing incident. The old man’s arrival forces Samuel to provide a form of care for which he has neither the vocation nor the words. In this forced intimacy, affection, revulsion, duty and resentment become intertwined. His father’s decline becomes a mirror that is hard to bear: what is inherited, what is feared, what can be explained by the illness, and what remains morally intolerable.

At the same time, two girls go missing in the city. Collective fear grows, the media conjure up a monstrous figure, and Samuel, increasingly trapped by his anxiety, begins to behave in a way that makes him a suspect.

Told in the second person, the novel traces the psychological breakdown of a man who is unable to control the way others perceive him.

In Refugees (“Refugiados”), two realities intertwine. In the first, a mother and her son struggle to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth, where government robots maintain an iron grip over a polluted and resource-depleted planet. On the other hand, there is the perspective of a spaceship, where a privileged and gifted few live. They have access to artificial girls, drugs and rock music to take their minds off the fact that they have been chosen to save the human race. Or, at least, that is what they believe at first. Despair and uncertainty are commonplace in both realities.

At the same time, memories of a better past give the characters the courage to try to change their circumstances. The turning point comes when the mother and child attempt to escape and the prime minister’s son is captured by a group of rebels aboard the spaceship, who wish to blackmail his father. Is there a way back to a better world?