Un futuro anterior
Mauro Libertella

FICTION | 2022 | 156 pages

One of the Best Books of 2022 according to Esquire, El País, and The Objective

They meet at a party in Buenos Aires. They're young, they go out every night, and the future is an unknown land of promises and light. However, things will get complicated very soon, because she starts dating a friend of his and they find themselves forced to have a secret relationship that reaches dramatic peaks and threatens to ruin it all.

Do they dare take one step further, to be together without hiding even if they have to reveal their betrayal? How will he be able to withstand the guilt? Could the attraction they feel transform itself into something real? These are some of the questions in this novel, which takes on a love story but also an emotional transformation. Narrated throughout the course of a decade, at the edge of the end of youth, Un futuro anterior opens a couple's black box in order to understand how they became who they are, including all their mistakes and their successes. It's also a story about the people and the things that were left behind during the journey, about what we're willing to sacrifice for the illusion of happiness.

In his new book, Mauro Libertella combines narration and essay writing with astonishing ease and walks across the abyss that separates literature from life, giving voice to a masculinity that is crossed by emotions. Written with crystalline, beautiful prose, Un futuro anterior is at once a feral investigation about one's own past, a requiem for lost friendships, and a letter thrown into the future.

RIGHTS: spanish SEXTO PISO | russian ARKADIA PUBLISHING

Few things are as exciting as seeing a great literary talent rise. Few things will be as exciting as immersing oneself in Mauro Libertella’s words for the first time.
— Leila Guerriero
Mauro Libertella manages to tell love stories in sober and subtle ways, breaking one of the greatest taboos of our time: the taboo of sentimentality.
— Martín Kohan
It’s worth diving into this story of friendship, desire, and jealousy. It’s worth finding ourselves in other people’s lives. It’s worth discovering this author. Reading Un futuro anterior is the closest thing to going back to that first love. And there are memories that are better to never forget.
— Librería Amapolas
[Un futuro anterior] stands out due to its many merits. In his inquiry into the great theme of romantic love, the analytical capacity that is characteristic of novels about first loves (from Constant to Radiguet) is clear. Because of this, Un futuro anterior has the charm and freshness of those small sentimental treatises of the “classical” kind—the brief, pleasant, and elegant style that evades solemnity. And through meticulous attention, it manages to pick apart the morale of contemporary love (...) Libertella’s writing shines in a unique way.
— Carlos Pardo, Babelia / El País
A novel with strange poetics, full of love that is fierce and yet slow, that develops throughout the course of several years. (...) Libertella’s voice is one that is oddly personal but that is also equipped with a certain conciseness, certain passiveness, as if it wasn’t about him—or, rather, as if it wasn’t about the protagonist of the novel, who begins with a wild love triangle and ends with the tamest urban domestication.
Esquire, Best Books of 2022 So Far
Libertella conceives of the novel as a mixed space where the autobiographical is merely the starting point to go beyond the I.
— Anna Maria Iglesia, La Lectura
A marvelous novel. Libertella doesn’t fall under the spell of romanticism from a manual.
— Antonio Lozano, La Vanguardia