Ark

Ricardo Menéndez Salmón redefines the ghost novel by blending elements of noir and the fantastic, transforming it into a meditation on the destiny of Europe 

In his adolescence, the protagonist of Ark developed an extraordinary gift that allows him to see what has happened in the past simply by touching an object. A skill that has made him immensely valuable to law enforcement, who have turned to him to solve the most complex crimes, and also to private companies that seek his help in obtaining a kind of information no one else can provide. 

Thanks to this talent, the Hägen-Schulz investment fund hires him to investigate the disappearance of one of its employees at Ca’ Barbarigo, a Venetian palace built in 1550, within whose walls all manner of events have taken place: loves, betrayals, murders, revenge, abandonments. As the narrator attempts to decipher the connection between the secrets harbored by the palazzo and the strange disappearance, Venice faces an unprecedented cataclysm that seems to herald the end of times. 

Ark is the most ambitious work in the career of an author who, in the tradition of writers such as Kafka, Beckett, and Orwell, champions the pleasure and inexhaustible plasticity of language as a means of exploring who we are and what we might become. It is a requiem, but it also heralds a new beginning, and it lays bare the power of fiction as a space from which to think through an era.