★An uncomfortable story. Acouple who lives togetherbut don’t love each other. Aterrace where you can eithersee what you no longer have,or you can value what is stillthere.
★A couple have lived together for years but they no longer loveeach other. One of them, Ale, sits on the terrace. It has a viewof a couple kissing in the street, how they play or make love in ahallway. Ale is falling in love with someone else and comeshome every day with more doubts. Seeing how some friendstreat each other badly, argue, mock and berate each other,they decide not to get to that point. They remember all thebeautiful moments in the relationship, realizing that there arenone left. Ale falls more and more in love with this new person.Unable to keep it a secret anymore, Ale confesses. Night hasfallen. Everything starts to break.

Ale and Ale, Alejandro and Alejandra, are a couple like the thousands that exist in the world, a couple that has been living together for years without loving each other, simply letting time pass because for the moment, they are better off together than apart, or at least that's what they believe.

The novel begins with Ale (we will never know if it's him or her, if it's Alejandro or Alejandra) looking from a terrace. From there, he/she observes a couple kissing in the park, swinging, playing with each other. He/she watches as they kiss each other on the street, make love in a doorway.

The person being observed, in turn, is starting to fall in love with someone at work, and every day comes home with more doubts. They realize that their relationship is a drifting ship, going nowhere.
There's a moment when they visit friends who, despite being a couple, treat each other poorly, arguing all the time, not loving each other, reproaching and ridiculing each other in public. That's when they realize they don't want to end up like that.

Throughout the novel, there are uncomfortable moments for both the couple and the reader: lying in bed, listening to the neighbors make love when they haven't been together for over a year. Passing by the place where they used to park the car on weekends to make love, and now they don't even look. Remembering all the beautiful moments in the relationship and realizing that none of them are left: when they tickled each other, held hands, hugged, drew hearts on trees...
Gradually, Ale falls more in love with this new person at work until one day when they can no longer keep the secret and confess to their partner. It's at night, and it's a dramatic moment where everything begins to shatter.

That's when the cordiality between them starts to break. Two people who loved each other begin to hate each other. During the conversation, one of them asks the typical questions in a breakup when there's a third party: How long have you been together? Who is it? Have you slept together already? Questions that don't really make sense.
For a while, the couple, now ex-couple, will continue to live together in the same house, but the atmosphere becomes increasingly unbearable.
From the terrace, Ale continues to observe other lives, especially that teenage couple that seems to do everything for the first time, who are so happy, holding hands, making each other laugh, hugging...

The relationship is already broken, but there is still an attempt to fix it. One's guilt, the other's hope. They even make love again together, but then they realize that there is nothing left, especially when one of them admits to thinking about someone else while they were doing it. That's when everything breaks definitively.

From that moment on, the atmosphere becomes unbearable, and one of them decides to leave home. Then comes the lawyer's call, the divorce papers, seeing how they divide their possessions...

At the end of the book, both Ales say goodbye from the terrace, and one of them asks if they remember when it was fun, when they made love in the park, in the doorway across the street, when they walked hand in hand, when their kisses lasted more than a second, when they laughed together... there the reader realizes that the couple Ale saw from the terrace were themselves when they were young, when they first met.

(IMPORTANT for translations: Throughout the novel, the reader never knows who is who, as both are called Ale. An intricate exercise ensures this, as all adjectives used have been carefully chosen not to reflect the gender of the speaker. This will be crucial in the translation process, requiring great care.)

Eloy Moreno
SPAIN — 1976. Has published fiction, children’s stories, and YA novels. His work is required reading in hundreds of schools and has been a critical and commercial success. His first self-published novel, "The Green Pen" , has sold more than 200,000 copies all over the world and has won numerous awards.And "The Green Pen" has been translated into English, Italian, Dutch, Serbian and traditional Chinese. After "The Green Pen", his "Invisible" and "Earth" became bestsellers, selling more than half a million copies. His latest trilogy of stories for children and "Stories that Make Us Understand the World" has been included in hundreds of education centers as required reading for children. His other works, "The Gift" and "Invisible" , won acclaim from readers and critics alike. With more than 1,000,000 copies of his books soldworldwide, he is one of the most widely read and loved writers, dueto his ability to address universal themes with sensitivity anduniqueness. Eloy's novels vindicate and fight for important valuesin our society, always through a plot full of enigmas and surprises.