I'm arriving in July feeling short on energy. It's been an intense year, and this week I wanted to write something light, something that wouldn't require too much emotional effort. But karma literary had other plans for me and it has come into my hands the latest novel by the Valencian writer Enric Pardo i Ramírez, The man of the house, published by La Magrana.

The visit of a clumsy and insistent encyclopedia salesman who ends up asking for the man of the house, even though there is no one in that home anymore, marks the beginning of the first novel by Enric Pardo (Castellón de la Plana, 1977) written in a rich and intimate Valencian. Broiled rice, Look what you've done and Lost faggot, Pardo has needed to reconstruct his childhood and remember how his obsession with fictional worlds – literary, cinematic and comics – was born in The man of the house (La Magrana, 2025), a naked, emotional and at times uncomfortable testimony about the difficult and defective construction of a child in the 1980s.