SHORTLISTED FOR IV PREMIO BIENAL DE NOVELA MARIO VARGAS LLOSA 2021 -
One Friday in May, on what is shaping up to be a perfect day, there is a strange explosion in a building in Lyon. One of the flats in the now ruined building was occupied by a group of students from various countries who were having a party. Paul, student of Fine Art; Emma, tormented by the tortuous history of her Spanish family; Luca, fascinated both with mathematics and with the cyclist, Marco Pantani; and Ilka, a student who left Berlin with nothing more than a guitar on her back: these are the tenants of a house that was a popular meeting place for the city’s students. In the neighbouring flat, also hit by the explosion, lives a quiet Moroccan family, whose members are apparently well-integrated into French life.
The novel explores events from various points of view. Through five narrators – victims and witnesses – we discover what happened that Friday night and the consequences that unfolded over the next three years, until their accounts have covered every hidden aspect of the explosion.
Rewind explores whether it is possible to rewind events. And examines our personal ghosts, the role of chance, the people who in the end we do not become, the secrets that must or must not be told, and our capacity to remake ourselves when we are broken. This novel is an espionage operation that investigates the mechanisms of life. How it changes without warning, turns, throws you into the air and destroys you when you are least prepared for it. And, just as mysteriously, how – if you survive everything life has to throw at you – it then allows you to remake yourself and keep moving forward.
