Juan Pablo Villalobos

I don't expect anyone to believe me, warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship when he's kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement. The gangsters are threatening his cousin—a wannabe entrepreneur known to some as 'Projects' and to others...

The future belongs to the migrant, the outsider, the foreigner. Long live our alien masters! Invasion of the Spirit People, Juan Pablo Villalobos's fifth novel, adopts a gentle, fable-like tone, approaching the problem of racism from the perspective that any position as idiotic as xenophobia can only be fought with sheer absurdity. In an unnamed city, occupied by an unnamed...