In The Things We've Seen, his most ambitious and accomplished novel to
date, Agustín Fernández Mallo captures the strangeness and
interconnectedness of human existence in the twenty-first century. A
writer travels to the small uninhabited island of San Simón, used as a
Franquist concentration camp during the Spanish Civil War, and witnesses
events which impel him on a wild goose chase across several continents.
In Miami, an ageing Kurt Montana, the fourth astronaut who secretly
accompanied Neil Armstrong and co. to the moon, revisits the important
chapters in his life, from serving in the Vietnam War to his memory of
seeing earth from space. In Normandy, a woman embarks on a walking tour
of the D-Day beaches with the goal of re-enacting, step by step, another
trip taken years before. Described as the novel David Lynch and W. G.
Sebald might have written had they joined forces to explore the B-side
of reality, The Things We've Seen is a mind-bending novel for our
disjointed times.