The latest from Antonio Muñoz Molina, one of Spain’s most celebrated writers, is YOUR STEPS ON THE STAIRS: A Novel (Other Press Trade Paperback Original; On Sale 4/8/25). In this disquieting psychological thriller, a couple’s new life in Lisbon begins to unravel. Laureat of the Prix Médicis in France in 2020, shortlisted for the Man Booker International award in 2018, author of nearly 20 novels, a number of book-long essays, memoirs and a short story collection, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s deep well of experience comes to life on the page in this latest novel about solitude, expectation and memory. Always keeping in mind the stories by Henry James which seem to straddle the ambiguous terrain between the ordinary and the mildly fantastic, memoirs of people subjected to rigorous isolation, as in Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s Alone, and Oliver Sacks’s essays about the vagaries of human perception of time, space and memory, here, Molina strove to grant a narrative, even poetic, sense of discovery.
A man travels to Lisbon ahead of his wife to prepare their newly purchased home, while she stays in New York to oversee a research project on the neuroscience of memory and fear. Leaving behind a phase of their relationship indelibly marked by 9/11, he revels in the Portuguese capital’s temperate weather and the neighborhood’s calm, meticulously planning the details of their future.
Yet beneath the peace and quiet of this routine, he feels a growing unease he can’t explain. Is it the similarity between the two cities, and the two apartments? A mysterious threat waiting in the wings?
A brilliant, deceptively simple novel of psychological suspense, perfect for fans of literary thrillers in translation and the introspective and unnerving work of writers like Clarice Lispector, YOUR STEPS ON THE STAIRS explores how our emotions and memories shape our perception of reality. With his subtle, masterful style, Antonio Muñoz Molina lays bare the fragility of the stories we so carefully craft about ourselves.
About the Author: Antonio Muñoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, among them Sepharad, A Manuscript of Ashes, and In Her Absence (Other Press). He has been awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society and the Prince of Asturias Award, among many others. Muñoz Molina lives in Madrid and New York City.
About the Translator: Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond’s Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.
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