El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia
Patricio Pron

FICTION | 2011/2024 | 240 pages

This is a daring, deeply affecting novel about the secrets buried in the past of an Argentine family; a story of fathers and sons, corruption and responsibility, memory and history, with a mystery at its heart.

A young writer, living abroad, returns home to his native Argentina to say goodbye to his dying father. In his parents' house, he finds a cache of documents―articles, maps, photographs―and unwittingly begins to unearth his father's obsession with the disappearance of a local man. Suddenly he comes face to face with the ghosts of Argentina's dark political past and with the long-hidden memories of his family's underground resistance against an oppressive military regime. As the fragments of the narrator's investigation fall into place―revealing not only a part of his father's life he had tried to forget, but also the legacy of an entire generation―MY FATHERS’ GHOST IS CLIMBING IN THE RAIN tells a completely original story of family and remembrance. It is an audacious accomplishment by an internationally acclaimed voice.

RIGHTS: spanish ANAGRAMA | english (UK) FABER & FABER | english (NA) KNOPF/VINTAGE | portuguese (BR) TODAVIA | chinese CHINA TIME | danish KLIM | arabic THAT AL SALASIL | french FLAMMARION | german ROWOHLT | greek IKAROS | italian GUANDA | farsi NEGAH | norwegian PAX | dutch MEULENHOFF | audio AUDIOGO

“Enthralling.”
— The New Yorker
“Patricio Pron is an immense talent, a daring writer with an absolutely unique voice. My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain is a marvel.”
— Daniel Alarcón
“Pron’s novel haunts me. [It] turned my heart upside down. [He] is brilliant on the topic of growing up in the aftermath of heroic collapse.”
— Marcela Valdes, The New York Times Book Review
“[A] moving meditation on trauma, memory, and home, beautifully translated. [Pron] probes the thorniest of ontological and epistemological questions, [and] compellingly displays—as well as explores—fiction’s power to unearth the most deeply buried emotional truths.”
— The Independent
“Radiant and wrenching. You’ll never see Argentina—or fathers or sons or the human soul—the same way again. [...] A sublime accomplishment.”
— Carolina De Robertis
“Hugely rewarding—and deeply unsettling.”
— New York Journal of Books
“A beautifully crafted novel, rich in metaphors [...] My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain draws you in and holds your attention [...] Pron paints a vivid picture of the aftermath of Argentina’s tortured recent history.”
— Washington Independent Review of Books
“Pron has stitched the experiences of the activists, their survivors, and those who came later into a narrative that ties the individual to collective memory and a family’s history to a nation’s.”
— Publishers Weekly
“[...] where a normal detective story ends with the narrative pointing out a guilty party who will be punished and thus allow the universe to return to a state of order, Pron’s narrative points in all directions. The reader is given no comforting or definitive answers, merely a mandate to continue the search. [...] It is a technique Pron succeeds at beautifully—showing us enough broken pieces to allow us to imagine what was once whole.”
— Phil Klay, The Daily Beast
“This book combines a remarkable use of language with a solid, original and brilliant narrative technique, unfolded to tell.”
— Francesca Lazzarato, Il Manifesto
“The novel is a successful narrative device that uses genres and registers with intelligence and skill; it is agile, witty, disturbing and self-conscious.”
— Daniel Gascón, Babelia
“The detective knot is not typical of thrillers: it has a moral background, as it is explained in the fragments that fuse the high literature and the intensity of the story.”
— Jordi Gracia, El País
“A mature, well-conceived and well-executed novel, that has the rare solvency that only a true writer achieves.”
— Miguel Dalmau, La Vanguardia
“I thought it was a book about one’s own memory, but it is a book about the collective memory. At times I was
lost in a search very much like in Trenque Lauquen, and in some abysms I was as hooked as with The Ring.”
— Lara Moreno
“This is a brilliant, unforgettable novel. I was so entertained by Patricio Pron’s inventive, poetic, deranging sentences that I found myself thinking of Lewis Carroll.”
— Francisco Goldman