En todo hay una grieta y por ella entra la luz
Patricio Pron

FICTION | 2026 | ~300 pages

A shapeshifting novel that is part essay, part biography, and part philosophical treatise that questions how we can write and live today in the midst of societal collapse

In a dark New York that is still reeling from the pandemic and in the shadow of Trump's new authoritarianism, an author is commissioned to write a biography of Benjamin Fondane: a French poet and filmmaker of Romanian origin, a witness to Parisian surrealism, and the creator of a cursed film in Buenos Aires who was ultimately murdered in Auschwitz. But the project is quickly interrupted: illness, grief, and a devastating event open a rift that allows the writer's family's past, the disappearance of a landscape, the ruins of the century, and the echoes of a fox whose gaze revealed a gift to his immigrant grandfather in Argentina to seep in. En todo hay una grieta y por ella entra la luz is a hybrid novel, halfway between an essay, an autobiography, an apocryphal biography, and a philosophical treatise—a text traversed by notes that expand upon it and a text that questions how we should live and write today in the midst of collapse. It also acts as an elegy for a crumbling world: a physical world, but also a symbolic and moral one. And it is an ambitious, desperate, necessary attempt to restore meaning to this world through imagination, artistic creation, and attention, as Simone Weil advocated for. 

A meditation on finitude, ecological mourning, visible and invisible violence, art as resistance, and the possibility of hope. With echoes of W. G. Sebald, Sigrid Nunez, Zadie Smith, Annie Dillard, and Rachel Cusk, this book confirms Patricio Pron as one of the most unique and daring narrators of his generation: radical, elegant, fierce, and melancholic. A writer who transforms desolation into vivid thought and narrative into luminously memorable emotions.

RIGHTS: spanish ANAGRAMA

“There Is A Crack in Everything, And Through It The Light Comes In – exceptional, tree-like, and with a conclusion full of hopeful transcendence that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.... This novel, renewing the author’s commitment to a style whose intelligence—a constant catalyst for ideas—is compatible with intense emotion (some of these pages contain the most beautiful passages you will read this year about love, with its misunderstandings, its clashes with the individual, loneliness or expectation).”
— Nadal Suau, Babelia, El País
“Pron’s deliberately difficult books are books that resist being written, that ultimately prevail, and they emerge with a force as great as their apparent naturalness. And while we are used to reading books with a lot of heart that still lack soul, well-intentioned projects without true literary substance, the opposite is true of Pron’s books—they are surrounded by a kind of strange coldness that is later completely dispelled, an air that is foreign and almost prickly that ends up warming up. The fire in his new novel is, as always, in the tone, but also in the subject matter: something like the collective damage stemming from a flood of individual suffering. The post-pandemic spirit, climate confusion, desperate migrations, Trump not as a symptom but as a symbol, or the things that were once good and that we needed but have now been subjected to all sorts of corruption, plundering, and cheapening—these things all give an imprecise form to a novel built on digressions. And that structure, backed by footnotes, makes it, I suppose, difficult to read on an electronic device, which would be enough for me to like it. The New York portrayed here (“it’s not well lit,” “it’s not exactly a place, but a speed”…) is very reminiscent of Teju Cole’s in Open City: it’s that same chant, that hallucinatory and sublime prose that serves so well as a soundtrack to our inert time, as full of possibilities as it is of fear, grief, and frustration”
— Juan Marqués, El Mundo
“It is a mature, incredibly powerful work in which the plot is the style. There Is A Crack In Everything [...] it is mind-blowing and hypnotic, a literary exercise that is also an exercise in breadth, with a meaning that is essential today: that of ceasing to study what is dead and trying not to kill what is alive.”
— Laura Fernández, El Mundo
“A profound reflection – in capital letters – on the deterioration of nature, the current crisis of Western democracies, and the role of humanity in
a world that is advancing blindly and madly – towards its own self-destruction?
It even includes a substantial meditation on the individual and their personal struggles: love, pain, grief, morality and the search for meaning. Generic hybridity, intertextuality and depth are, likewise, components of a text that will satisfy readers who are not content with the obvious.”
— Acensión Rivas, EL Cultural
“Patricio Pron has published a novel that explores the intellectual and artistic persona of the French poet, philosopher, playwright and filmmaker Benjamin Fondane (1898–1944)... Between the writing of this biography and memories of the past, he confronts New York with his recollections of a childhood spent in an idyllic natural setting, perhaps lost forever, which here appears as a dark, dehumanised city illuminated only by large neon signs. Beyond the skyscrapers lies a city teeming with abandoned beggars and collective loneliness. A symbolic element, such as a fox with an enigmatic gaze, completes the excellence of this elaborate and precise novel.”
— Jesús Ferrer, La Razón
“‘There is a crack in everything, and that is how the light gets in’, by Patricio Pron, is a kaleidoscopic, vast and complex work.”
— Ricardo Baixeras, El Periódico
“Like good books, like good literature, which tells us that we are approaching the end of an era – we may not know what it will be like, but it will come. Through his nature-centred narrative, Pron raises the questions that human beings do not want to ask themselves. That is where his courage lies.”
— Pedro Bosqued, Heraldo de Aragón
“As is always the case in Pron’s writing—so serious, so unpredictable, so different—the situations are merely a pretext for reflecting on other matters. He is one of the most conscientious and brilliant writers on our literary scene.”
— Juan Marqués, La Vanguardia
“Patricio Pron’s latest novel confirms something that was already evident in his previous books: that his narrative project does not consist of telling stories, but rather of questioning the mechanisms that make them possible. His style, interwoven with cultural references and a critical perspective on literature itself, transforms each text into an exploration of what it means to tell and remember stories in times of uncertainty.”
— Luis Artigue, elDiario.es
“A captivating work, full of reflections on life—both personal and collective—and on how we relate to one another, but also on the collective reality that emerges from our contemporary society, which is as confusing as it is unsettling.”
— Ramón Rozas, Diario de Pontevedra
“Following in the footsteps of Simone Weil, Pron posits that attention to all living things is a potential site of resistance. Set in New York, with all its light and shade, this novel—written by a reader for other readers—is defiant and continues to resonate in a lasting trance (much like the way art works within us) long after its 225 pages have been turned.”
— Raquel Garzón, Clarín
“The most sophisticated and mesmerising work to be published so far this decade. It opens the door to what could be the future of narrative in our language.”
— Sabino Méndez, La Razón
“Pron has become a master of elliptical digression and almost mystical synapses, of the perfectly captured free association of ideas, and of the controlled evocation of deeply personal epiphanies that suddenly attain the intensity of the universal. Pron returns and gives back. And he does so with a book that is intellectually and emotionally alive, and better than any of his previous works. A book that is all books.”
— Rodrigo Fresán, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos
“This book, which raises more questions than it answers, reveals an ever-increasing lyrical versatility in Pron’s writing, which is becoming increasingly experimental, edgy and intelligent.”
— José María Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC Cultural
“And to think that there is no path more political than the one that recognises there are no simple answers; that everything happens at once: the best and the worst; that everything has a cause and a consequence; that everything can be a Borgesian Aleph from which to observe the simultaneity of the world; that a book can be a place that is a game, without hierarchies, where chance and coincidences are reflected. I have just quoted Borges. And Auster: ‘In everything there is a crack and through it the light comes in’ is the music of chance. And Cohen’s idea. The light that manages to make its way through and rise up, fragmented, in the beautiful inventory with which the novel concludes.”
— Fernando Menéndez, La Nueva España
“There Is A Crack In Everything… to savour it, the reader needs only surrender to Pron’s exquisite prose and let themselves be carried away, delving into a literary reality that sometimes appeals to our reason and at other times merely hints, yet is always seductive. It is a way of encountering that unbiased gaze that knows itself to be trapped in an inaccessible and capricious reality, towards which one can only adopt a comprehensive attitude. There is no plot to summarise, no story to structure the book’s 225 pages. And yet, upon finishing the book, one cannot help but find a hidden conceptual coherence in what is told, which is a great deal. Or, if you prefer, an existential stance with which it is not difficult to sympathise.”
— Carlos Manzano, Culturamas
“In a context where language models and automation technologies seem to threaten the uniqueness of creation, a commitment to complexity and originality takes on political significance. To write as Patricio Pron does is to resist homogenisation, to affirm the distinctiveness of a voice, and to remain true to a conception of writing as a space for exploration and risk-taking.”
— Pierre Froidevaux, Perfil
“There Is a Crack In Everything, And That Is How The Light Gets In is radical because it delves deeply into its ideas, which are clear and empowering; it is elegant in its use of language, exquisite, capable of creating spaces we never want to leave; fierce because what must appear raw, does so; and melancholic because the atmosphere that pervades the pages has that charm of fleeting beauty, as if to remind us that, after all, we are made of the same stuff as our stories.”
— Diego L. García, Rialta