The Pain of Others: A Novel

In this blend of police thriller and poignant autofiction, a writer revisits a tragic crime from his adolescence and reckons with a dark, under-explored side of Spain.




On Christmas Eve 1995, Miguel Ángel Hernández’s best friend murdered his sister and took his own life by jumping off a cliff. It happened in a small hamlet in the Murcia countryside. No one ever knew why. The investigation was closed, and the crime forgotten.




Twenty years later, when the wounds seem to have stopped bleeding and the mourning died down, Miguel decides to return to the countryside and, putting himself in the shoes of a detective, tries to reconstruct that tragic night that marked the end of his adolescence. But traveling in time always means altering the past, and the investigation will awaken ghosts that he thought he had left behind: a childhood marked by the Church, by sin and guilt; the constant presence of illness and death; the oppressive, closed world from which he managed to escape.




This raw, moving novel about the collision of two worlds and two ways of life is a reckoning with the past and, above all, a subtle and incisive meditation on the ethics of literature, which makes us aware that “writing isn’t always a triumph, that sometimes, we too may founder upon the pain of others.”