The Architecture of Fear

**'Brilliant, inventive and marvellously written' ALBERTO MANGUEL

A world without walls, without curtains, is not believable.
Because there is no world without fears.
Walls, curtains, are the architecture of fear.
And the fear is us.**

At the heart of a forest there is a city surrounded by walls.

Inside, the people are haunted by the memory of The Great Disaster that eliminated two thirds of their population.

A dictatorial regime insists that order and discipline will protect the people from the threats of nature, but when a soldier is found mutilated outside the city walls on a winter's night, a new order takes root silently in the minds of the oppressed.

One by one, they gather to listen to the voice of a man claiming to possess the gift of knowing what is to come. The man known as The Messenger.

An unsettling, powerful and strikingly-written dystopian fable about revolution, power and oppression - for readers of Agustina Bazterrica, Margaret Atwood, and I Who Have Never Known Men.

Ángel Gurría-Quintana is a historian, journalist and literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese. He writes regularly for the books pages of the Financial Times. His translations include Other Carnivals: Short Stories from Brazil (Full Circle Editions, 2013) and The Return, by Dulce Maria Cardoso (Maclehose Press, 2016).