Breathing Through the Wound A Novel

Named a Best International Crime Novel of the Year by CrimeReads and a Best Book of the Year by PopMatters 

From the acclaimed author of A Million Drops, an engrossing psychological thriller that traces a widower’s descent into the seedy underbelly of Madrid.

Eduardo Quintana’s life lost all meaning when his wife and daughter were killed in a tragic accident. The once renowned painter wallows in grief and guilt, subsisting on alcohol and drugs, not caring if he lives or dies.

But when a grieving mother asks Eduardo to paint a portrait of the man who killed her son, he finds himself drawn to the unusual commission. He alone understands her need to look deep into the soul of the man who changed her life forever, and he alone can help.

As Eduardo sets out to discover what it takes to know a killer, he is pulled deeper and deeper into Madrid’s criminal underworld, where mercenaries, prostitutes, murderers, and thieves are all entangled in a dangerous and deadly web, in which nothing, and no one, are as they seem.

Víctor del Árbol was born in Barcelona in 1968 and was an officer of the Catalan police force from 1992 to 2012. As the recipient of the Nadal Prize, the Tiflos Prize, and as the first Spanish author to win the Prix du Polar Européen, he has distinguished himself as a prominent voice in Spanish literature. His novel A Million Drops (Other Press, 2018) was named a Notable Book of the Year by the Washington Post.

Lisa Dillman teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She has translated a number of Spanish and Latin American writers. Some of her recent translations include Rain Over Madrid; August, October; and Death of a Horse, by Andrés Barba, and Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera.