Effervescence and nostalgia: a novel about friendship in a world heading towards collapse.
Rita lives in the Colony, high up on a mountain where tired men are emptying a mine that is running out. From there, she watches the town sunk in the valley, and the forests that suddenly begin to burn. Líton, who grew up in the city, puts out the fires with the other kids from the Service.
This novel follows the story of the two friends: childhood in opposite contexts, the discovery of desire, their loves with Fèlix and René – and the nostalgia for a future that will no longer be. Together they experience emancipation and the festive effervescence of their twenties, but also the servitudes of family and an era marked by extinction: what will the buzz of a bee sound like? In a world heading for collapse, where life cannot be lived, Rita and Líton turn friendship into a conspiracy to imagine a livable universe.
Pol Guasch has written a book in which every dose of pain has its dazzling reverse, and every ending foretells a new beginning. Disorderly like memory, dark and luminous at the same time, En las manos, el paraíso quema is melancholic as only witnessing the fade to black of the world’s youth can be.
