Blitz

From the author of Learning to Lose, David Trueba's new novel about a young Spanish architect's affair with an older German woman.
 
Blitz is a romantic tragicomedy that recounts the exploits of Beto, a young architect who heads to Munich with his girlfriend to take part in a landscape-planning competition. In an instant, a text message Beto wasn't meant to receive shatters him, leaving him bewildered and heading nowhere. But unintentionally he falls into the arms of Helga, an older woman, in a cross-generational encounter that is the heart of the tale.
     With sensitivity and biting wit, Trueba crafts a story of errant souls and lost loves, humorously critiquing male narcissism, all the while showing us that in this modern age it is more important than ever to appreciate every moment and embrace intimacy when luck allows it, no matter from where.

David Trueba is a film director and screenwriter as well as a novelist. He is the author of Cuatro amigos, which sold more than 100,000 copies in Spain, and his English-language debut, Learning to Lose, which won Spain’s National Critics Prize in 2009. Trueba’s latest film, Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed, which he wrote and directed, was long-listed for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2015 and won Goya awards for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, among others.
 
John Cullen was the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Siegfried Lenz’s The Turncoat, Juli Zeh’s Empty Hearts, Patrick Modiano’s Villa Triste, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, and Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck.