A strange, elegant, war-haunted novel about identity, erasure, false papers, railways and  memory. 

Set around the shadows of WWII and its bureaucratic afterlife, the novel circles questions of names, borders, orders, and responsibility: what happens when a person can be renamed, displaced, absorbed into machinery, or made anonymous by historical force. Padilla works in that Borges-adjacent register where history becomes a maze and the self is less a stable thing than a document someone may have misfiled, forged, or destroyed. 

Very much for readers who like their fiction cold, clever, metaphysical, and faintly cursed — the sort of book where trains are never just trains, and paperwork is basically a species of violence.

Paperback. Scribner UK. First published in Great Britain 2002; this edition published 2003. Translated by Peter Bush and Anne McLean. Light general handling visible, but clean and solid.