Fracture

Hardcover | 368 pages 

Andrés Neuman’s most ambitious novel to date, a story about how every society remembers and forgets its catastrophes

An earthquake unnerves Tokyo on March 11, 2011, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster—and a tectonic stirring of the collective past. Mr. Yoshie Watanabe, an aging executive at an electronics company and a survivor of the atomic bomb, feels as though he is a fugitive of his own memory. As the seams of his country threaten to come undone yet again, he braces himself to make the biggest decision of his life.

Meanwhile, four women narrate their own memories of Watanabe to an enigmatic Argentinian reporter investigating his life. Their stories, told in different languages and describing different loves, map a sociopolitical tour of Tokyo, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid, proving that nothing ever happens in one place, that every human event reverberates to the ends of the earth.