06/13/2025
JUSTO ANTES DEL FINAL by Emiliano Monge—both the portrait of a mother and a mural of the world we live in—was first published by Penguin Libros México and is out now in Italy with La nuova frontiera 🎉
This is a story about a woman who confronts her time period and her world, but also a story about that time period and that world: the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the century we’re currently in.
In Justo antes del final, the protagonist’s life—a life marked by invisibility, sickness, madness, and violence, but also by resilience, willpower, affection, and the care for the self and for others—finds itself in tension among some of the great public events: the arrival of contraceptive pills, the invention of the instant camera, the development of mental health treatments, the space race, the race for the perfect auditory prosthesis, the discovery of antimatter, the diagnosis of the Asperger spectrum, investigations on how to prolong life, the Kyoto Protocol…
Returning to the autobiographical realm, Emiliano Monge has managed to do something seemingly impossible: writing a novel that is at once a portrait and a mural.
Rights have sold so far to Penguin Random House (World Spanish), La Nuova Frontiera (Italian), Producciones P.P. / Diego Luna (Film/TV), and EACZ Editora (Portuguese, PT) so far. More information: https://www.indentagency.com/justo-antes-del-final