Your Steps on the Stairs: A Novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina

A couple’s new life in Lisbon unravels in this heady and unsettling psychological thriller from one of Spain’s most celebrated writers.

A man travels to Lisbon ahead of his wife to prepare their new 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, the man revels in the Portuguese capital’s temperate weather and the neighborhood’s calmness, 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 Muñoz Molina lays bare the fragility of the stories we so carefully craft about ourselves.

REVIEWS

“In a cool, controlled translation…Your Steps on the Stairs builds to a crescendo of suspense by enveloping the reader in the narrator’s memories, obsessions, and, it becomes increasingly clear, delusions…This novel possesses the eerie melancholy of a work of crime noir, where the nemesis is some truth too intolerable to face with open eyes.” —Wall Street Journal

“[An] effortless translation…a novel of the human interior. Like the best novels about that interiority, it tiptoes elegantly along the wavy line between realism and delirium. Muñoz Molina’s assured style belies and complicates the narrator’s confidence.” —Washington Post

“[A] harrowing drama of subtleties…Molina writes in pulse-like scenes, and each vignette thickens the novel’s uneasy atmosphere, obscuring our conception of place and, eventually, our conception of what’s real.” —The New Yorker

PRODUCT DETAILS
Trade Paperback
Publisher: Other Press
ISBN: 978-1635424348
Pages: 304