When their friend and neighbour Manuel is left an in coma after a car accident, Julio, a film set designer, and his wife, Laura, a masseuse in an urban spa, begin to journey down strange ways. The fact that they live in an apartment that is a mirror image of their neighbours has something to do with it, as does the fact that Julio become attracted to the land of shadows, a world that he first created to entertain a child but which then he develops for himself. Meanwhile, Laura enters into a strange correspondence of her own that lacks any recipient. Laura and Julio looks at the eternal triangle once again, although in this case the third party never makes an appearance. A self-proclaimed genius, his presence is so strongly felt that it undermines the existential essence of the married couple as they separately attempt to assimilate what he means to each of them. Millas has firmly rooted this comic and painful novel in his on-going investigation of the human individual, always in search of the panacea that will cure all its fears and discomforts, torn between submerging itself into a partnership or struggling free from one as a newly fledged personality, and all the time lost in a world of illusions and delusions. On its release in Spain, Laura and Julio rapidly ran up sales of over 150,000 copies, which left no one surprised. Juan Jose Millas is one of Spain's most loved and respected authors, who appeals to a broad spectrum of readers and at a multitude of levels.
