Your Steps on the Stairs

A couple's new life in Lisbon unravels in this heady and unsettling psychological thriller from one of Spain's most celebrated writers.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 Munoz Molina lays bare the fragility of the stories we so carefully craft about ourselves.

“An anxious, unconventional thriller by Muñoz Molina, a literary superstar in Spain…Reading this book, which has been elegantly translated by Curtis Bauer, feels like hearing a constant alarm ringing in a neighbor’s house. You’ll want to read the ending more than once.” —New York Times Book Review, Best Thrillers of the Month

“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

“[A] disquieting psychological suspense novel…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.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Originally published in Spain in 2019, this psychologically informed exploration of loss may resonate even more with readers in our current tumultuous moment.” —Booklist

“An effective reflection of [the narrator’s] tragic self-deceit—and also, perhaps, of a universal fear of abandonment.” —Times Literary Supplement

“A novel of delusion…and of coping with trauma…well done.” —Complete Review

“Molina is a beautiful writer. He has the talent for describing mundane tasks and ordinary days that make these encounters seem fascinating and special…Your Steps on the Stairs will resonate with many who share Bruno’s fears for where we are now and where we are headed.” —Woman Around Town

“A masterly subtle trip into the mind of a man waiting for his wife amidst his apocalypse, Your Steps on the Stairs dissects the myriad distractions and deceits we cope with in this dystopic-modern world. In prose spun so expertly it leaves you daydreaming inside the elusive Lisbon and New York City of this novel, Muñoz Molina achieves a reverberant psychological unraveling that will suspend, overturn, and consume your optimism for reality.” —Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming

Antonio Munoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Sepharad, A Manuscript of Ashes, and In Her Absence. He has been awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society and the Prince of Asturias Award, among many others. Munoz Molina lives in Madrid and New York City.Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond's Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.

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