A modernist tour de force from an exhilarating new talent

'Monumental, funny, potent, and fresh' Carlos Fonseca, author of Natural History

Antonio is living a double life – and doing a pretty good job of it. By day he's Antonio, mild-mannered database analyst, recent divorcé and father of two. In private, however, he spends hours on seedy pick-up websites or combing fiction and film for the solutions to his problems.

And then, Antonio's sister goes missing. 

Her disappearance forces Antonio to confront not only his own troubled past, but his mother's decision to leave Colombia with two young children in tow, his ex-wife's obsessive, unhappy relationship with her homeland and, ultimately, the reason for his sister's despair. 

Propulsive and freewheeling, bold and hilarious, Mauro Javier Cárdenas' second novel is a daring examination of identity in a world that seems determined to fragment us. 

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'Mauro Javier Cárdenas has knocked down the novel as we know it, and built a cathedral out of the debris. Aphasia is monumental, funny, potent, and fresh. It marks a new beginning.'

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'Mauro Javier Cárdenas's Aphasia batters at the limits of guilt, of masculinity, of love and promiscuity, of the American family and English syntax.'

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'Brainy and decadent, playful and outrageous, Aphasia marks the comeback of the Self in a spiraling trip into contemporary manhood and the Latin American spirit that will render you speechless.'

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'Long, breathless sentences dizzying and richly packed with memories, connections, and literary references. Cárdenas undercuts the idea of a single, stable identity and suggests the self as a many-layered work in progress... Fans of the author's inventive, ambitious debut novel will find the same sardonic intelligence, paired here with a deep humanity... Original, richly felt, deftly written.'