Bonkers

Everyone in the neighborhood knows his story, but no one knows the truth. The funniest and most brilliant novel by Juan Manuel Gil 

After more than thirty years working as a school caretaker, Leo Almada—bonkers—is unexpectedly forced into early retirement. This event will lead him to become the protagonist of a disturbing episode whose main victims are the school’s students. Shocked by what has happened, everyone in the neighbourhood shares what they know about him and offers their own theories about the reasons that drove this man to commit what some saw as an act of madness and others as the worst of their nightmares.

Bonkers is a dazzling novel made up of the testimonies of those who knew its protagonist. Everyone seems to have something to say about the caretaker: his unsettling habits, his unconfessable secrets, and the reasons why he was always considered one of the strangest men in the neighbourhood—yet also one of the kindest, most tender, discreet, and generous. In this way, we witness the creation of a luminous and wildly eccentric constellation of stories that reveals a life shaped by contradictions, half-truths, necessary lies, and unexpected twists.

With boundless originality, Bonkers is a work that uses orality and humour as a way of reaching the heart of the torments we sometimes carry with us throughout an entire lifetime. Juan Manuel Gil’s new novel is deeply funny, unique, and vibrant to the very last page, drawing us into that luminous fiction which allows us to unravel a darker reality.