El Silk Road
Angélica Liddell

NOVEL | 2026 | 320 pages

After spending seven days shut away in a hotel room, a gaijin decides to wander the streets of Asakusa, where temples, old cafés, prostitutes, beggars, suicidal people and hungry spirits coexist with the scars of earthquakes and bombings, with the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Battle of Okinawa and the old Yoshiwara. In the heart of the neighbourhood, the gaijin finds the Silk Road, a café run by an elderly couple, where she happens upon a solitary customer. They barely look at one another and do not share a common language, yet between them a longing is born, made of waiting, silence and incense smoke.

The Silk Road transforms an almost empty café and the streets of Asakusa into the centre of an obsession, with a woman trying to stop being a foreigner, for whom any hint of beauty, far from offering comfort, stirs up terror and violence. 

RIGHTS: spanish MALAS TIERRAS

“Through the ways in which she constructs implausible plots, plays on our fear and revulsion, yet also intoxicates us, Liddell’s clairvoyance prevails. You come away from her prose fattened like a hog on the eve of the knife: pleasure and pain in every line.”
— Luna Miguel