The Architecture of Fear English 2026

'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.

Angel Gurria-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).