Marcelo, a humble clerk in a Barcelona office who might have come from a novel by Kafka, inhibits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing and a mental trauma has meant that he has been unable to put pen to paper; he has become a 'Bartleby'.

Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948. His extraordinary literary oeuvre includes Bartlby & Co, Montano and Never Any End to Paris, winner of the same Premio R¿mulo Gallegos that catapulted his friend Roberto Bola¿o to international renown. He has been translated into 30 languages.