A meeting with the Lady

A Date with the Lady is a spectral journey between life and death, between love and loss, in this stunning debut by Mateo García Elizondo. "I came to Zapotal to die once and for all. As soon as I set foot in the town, I got rid of everything in my pockets, the keys to the house I'd abandoned in the city, all my cards, everything that had my name or a picture of my face on it. I have no more than three thousand pesos left, twenty grams of opium paste, and seven grams of heroin, and that has to be enough to kill me." The protagonist and narrator of A Date with the Lady seeks a final encounter with his lady in the form of a white powder to be injected into his arm, and to do so, he embarks on a journey to a village forgotten in time. There, he encounters disturbing figures and ghosts of friends awaiting him on the other side, and on his journey to the end of everything, he must deal with memories of the city he came from and his past. The first sentence of *A Date with the Lady* evokes the mythical beginning of Juan Rulfo's *Pedro Páramo*, and its pages echo the grotesque carnival of self-destruction in Malcolm Lowry's *Under the Volcano*. With captivating and hypnotic prose, Mateo García Elizondo narrates, in this extraordinary debut, winner of the 2019 Premio Ciutat de Barcelona, a journey into the heart of darkness, a spectral descent into the underworld of an addict who embarks on a path with a single possible destination, one that draws ever closer. "We are faced with a most compelling voice, capable of sustaining the pulse of the story through direct and fluid discourse that fluctuates between the contemporary and the ancestral." — El Periódico