The difficult light

When life and death merge in a painful state. From an author still unpublished and little-known in Brazil, one of the great Latin American works of recent times arrives in bookstores: The Difficult Light, by Tomás González. Gripping and moving, the book recounts the suffering of a man just hours away from the fate of his eldest son, moving everyone with the power of things that know how to remain silent. After a traffic accident that leaves him with excruciating leg pain, Jacobo—the protagonist's eldest son, David—decides to travel to a city where he can undergo euthanasia to end his suffering. The book depicts the ordeal endured by the family as they await the outcome of this episode. Narrated by the father twenty years later, The Difficult Light recounts the feelings and contradictions he faced at the time, alongside his wife and closest friends. Through long-hidden and now clouded memories, David describes how he endured the hours clinging to the hope of an inevitable and possibly selfish question: at the last minute, will he regret it? Vigorous and moving, The Difficult Light lucidly presents the narrative of an author who has always been interested in exploring the proximity of opposites, showing the reader that when death is imminent, there is no other option but to reclaim and tell the story of life. Here, words and silences have equal intensity. "If García Márquez is Wagner, Tomás González is Bob Dylan." (Arcadia, Colombia) "The definitive consecration of an author considered the best-kept secret in Colombian literature." (Semana, Colombia)