The husband of his lover and other short stories

Drawn from a personal or someone else’s anecdote or a commonplace and apparently inconsequential occurrence, these tales reveal surprising backstories, complex motivations, and unusual human relationships. The effort to rescue a cat up a tree, a phone call about the death of a former rival in adolescent love, a silly married-couple argument, an extreme preoccupation with being on time, an erotic obsession, a psychological complex over masculinity, a dream-like episode and a crime of passion are the starting points for the painstaking psychological explorations of fascinating inner lives. Hiram Sánchez Martínez, author of the excellent memoir, Cuesta de los judíos número 8, turns to fiction in this his first collection of short stories. To his extraordinary powers of observation of “the human comedy,” he adds his creativity, full of dramatic as well as comedic twists and turns, with a good dose of Hitchcockian suspense, all in superbly written and elegant prose, which makes reading these stories an intellectual and literary delight.