The Past Pursues Us Like Detectives, Debt Collectors, Thieves
- Author: Juan Pablo Villalobos (Mexico)
- Book type: Mexican novel
- Original: El pasado anda atrás de nosotros (2024)
- English translation: Daniel Hahn
- Publisher: And Other Stories
- To be released: July 21, 2026
- Length: 240 pages
- Format: paperback
- Prize: £14.99
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Juan Pablo Villalobos The Past Pursues Us Like Detectives, Debt Collectors, Thieves reviews and information
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- “The Past Pursues Us is a masterful example of how to push autobiography to the extremes of fiction, allowing the imagination to explore themes rooted in the author’s life. Themes that, when taken to their limits, reveal a sharp glimpse of an inexorable truth.” (Nicolás Giacobone, screenwriter of Birdman)
Blurb of the Juan Pablo Villalobos novel
After many peaceful years abroad, JP has returned home to Mexico to visit family and help care for his elderly mother. Instead, however, he finds himself at a bar, his fist inches from the face of Everardo, his sort-of childhood friend. He lands the blow and runs home. But when Everardo turns up dead the next morning, JP soon finds himself blamed for a murder that he (probably) didn’t commit. What’s going on? Can Lagos really be more full of drugs, extortion, and fraud than when he left? Why is everyone offering him pills? How’s he ever going to pay for his mother’s medical treatment? It wasn’t even that good a punch!
Weaving outright hilarity with wry tenderness, The Past Pursues Us is a fast-paced and funny whodunit that lovingly speaks to the stories we tell ourselves about home: about what changes, what doesn’t, and what should.
Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He studied marketing and Spanish literature, before working as a market researcher, and writing travel stories and literary and film criticism. He has researched topics as diverse as the influence of the avant-garde on the work of César Aira and the flexibility of pipelines for electrical installations.