Mañana tendremos otros nombres
Patricio Pron

FICTION | 2019 | 264 pages

WINNER OF THE 2019 ALFAGUARA NOVEL PRIZE

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 CRITICS’ AWARD IN SPAIN

These days they live in Madrid. She’s an architect who’s afraid of making plans for the future and is seeking something she can't define. He's an essayist. He’s been by her side for four years and has never thought about being single again, in a dating “market” that he knows nothing about. Friendships, friendly advice and lives enter through the cracks as their relationship collapses, most of the time filling it with more doubts than certainties. This is the Tinder generation, the generation of people who get rid of one another with the swipe of a finger, a generation in which everyone is exposed and disenchanted. This couple's break-up also reflects a country, a time, an idea of coexistence. The book paints a harsh portrait of the times: parents who are only parents by obligation, experiments of personal reinvention that are performances without an audience, technologies that penetrate everything, including intimacy. She and He, now close to their forties, start to inhabit these new possible spaces in parallel, without heartbreak but with a strong mysterious longing that may reunite them again.

Mañana tendremos otros nombres is a look at the emotional relationships of the human animal from a sociological viewpoint that doesn’t neglect tenderness. It is, above all, the great love story in the time of social media.

RIGHTS: spanish ALFAGUARA | portuguese (BR) TODAVIA | german ROWOHLT | greek IKAROS | italian SUR | swedish NORSTEDTS

“Tomorrow We Will Have Other Names is the fascinating autopsy of the break-up of a loving relationship which goes beyond love: it is the emotional map of a neurotic society where relationships are consumer goods. Beneath the anonymity of He and She, Pron builds the story of two characters who are vaguely aware that they are drifting apart. A wise, subtle text, with enormous psychological depth, which exceptionally reflects the contemporary era and takes the pulse of the new ways of understanding emotions.”
— 2019 Alfaguara Novel Prize Jury
“I have the feeling that we have given the prize to an excellent novel that time may very well turn into a masterpiece.”
— Juan José Millás, president of the 2019 Alfaguara Novel Prize Jury
“This novel is the cutting story of a break-up taking place in the heart of today’s capitalism.”
— Manuel Vilas
“A kind of fictional parable that aims to showcase the ‘new forms of desire’ that are shattered by precariousness and ambivalence.”
— Ricardo Baixeras, El Periódico
“Pron seems to have written his novel in real time, with a clarity that is difficult to attain in the here and now, clambering into the instant while the world we know seems to vanish and become another one every second.”
— Rodrigo Manigot, La Agenda
“Pron is playing with us. He makes us identify with and also curse every narrative device, each body in his plot, until we’re left in no-man’s land. It’s as if we had been kicked out of all our WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram groups at once and deported to a ‘liquid’ world.”
— Ángeles López, La Razón
“An essay camouflaged as a novel, Tomorrow We Will Have Other Names squeezes out a lucid and unsettling state of things that goes from minute to massive, revealing today’s inextricable and unprecedentedly vulnerable link between intimacy and economic, social and technological structures.”
— Javier Mattio, La Voz del Interior
“Pron frames a crisis among a couple, a painful breakup, in the context of our political and social crisis, highlighting new models of coexistence, feminist theories and new masculinities. Another stunning piece of analytical prose by the author.”
— Elena Hevia, El Periódico
“How can we love, truly love, in this incomprehensible and uncontrollable mess? The best of Tomorrow We Will Have Other Names (which in the end never rejects being a romantic love novel) are the intermittent responses, the characters drifting apart and its sharp meditations on our newfound romantic instability.”
— Jorge Volpi, Reforma
“Pron manages to portray the problems that afflict today’s society, such as domestic violence, capitalism run amok, the crisis of the novel and the new meaning of feelings in the age of apps and invasive technology. This book is a great reflection about our time.”
— Felipe González Gómez, El Tiempo
“The novel puts narrative design (its structure) to work in its commitment against the prevailing logic of fear, what Mark Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’. We discover connections everywhere with the best of feminist theory, with the debates about new masculinities and new emotional networks, and it’s astounding that this all manages to take shape in narrative form. The result is magnificent.”
— Nadal Suau, El Cultural
“Tomorrow We Will Have Other Names [...] is an original, rabidly intellectual work, a road trip movie, where the path is not a highway, but rather the mental steps while mourning after losing a partner and the way in which people reaffirm or modify these steps based on the knowledge of other relationships. The final destination is, like in every relationship, unique.”
— Carlos López-Aguirre, Suburbano
“A novel-essay in Kundera’s wake that isn’t afraid to talk and reflect and get its hands dirty with sociology. It alternates the narration of more or less prosaic and commonplace facts with sharp, often revealing analyses about our existence.”
— Mario Capello, Huffington Post