Your steps on the stairs A novel

Anticipating the arrival of his beloved, a man ruminates about intimacy, memory, and loss. Having fled the "perpetual extortion" of life in New York for a quieter existence in Portugal, Bruno arranges the new apartment to look like the old one, chills some wine, and waits for Cecilia. She is a researcher who studies memory, dissecting the brains of rats. In their early days together, they experienced the 9/11 attacks. Now he buys the seed bread she likes, walks their dog, and reads about Admiral Richard Byrd wintering alone in Antarctica. "Reading is compatible with waiting," he observes, "wandering without monotony." Meanwhile, the weather has turned apocalyptic, the U.S. has a new government, and the end seems near. Contrasting Bruno's brooding, anguished interior landscape with the relative serenity of his old-town Lisbon surroundings, Muñoz Molina (To Walk Alone in the Crowd, 2021) emphasizes his narrator's blind spots and the distortions of perception that follow heartbreak. Originally published in Spain in 2019, this psychologically informed exploration of loss may resonate even more with readers in our current tumultuous moment.

An American expat in Portugal obsessively prepares for his wife's arrival in this disquieting psychological suspense novel from Muñoz Molina (To Walk Alone in the Crowd). After being fired from his corporate job, the unnamed narrator packs up and sells the New York apartment he shares with his wife, neuroscientist Cecilia, and decamps to the couple's property in Lisbon. Climate change is accelerating, he reasons, and there's no better location from which to watch the world end. He hires a team to help transform their new residence into a replica of the old one and then settles in with his dog to wait for a cab to deliver Cecilia. The narrative unfolds in a woozy flow of first-person musings and reminiscences, making it difficult to gauge time's passing, but the more books the narrator reads and the more calls he dodges, the more questions arise surrounding Cecilia's continued absence. Anxiety and dread mount steadily, while elegiac prose and eccentric supporting characters amplify the story's surrealism straight through to the sucker-punch ending. It's a stunning blend of mystery and literary fever dream. Agent: Jeffrey Posternak, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)