What Do I Know

An exquisite and magnetic prose of a youngster who, defenseless, reflects about her zest for life incompatible with the confining world of an isolated small town. A beautiful, tender and touching novel.

L ea is 19 years old and thinks she’s seen it all, even though she’s never left the Small Town, a leafy Hamlet somewhere in the Country, halfway between the Big Town and the City. She has just met a stranger who lost his dog in the forest. In order to convince him to wait for the dog to return instead of entering the tangled bush to retrieve it, she begins to tell her story, which is the story of a great fear; a story set in 2012 when everyone was convinced that the world was ending. Lea has an airhead sister, a father who works from sunrise to sunset on lands that once belonged to the family and now belong to the town bigwigs, a mother who’s also named Lea and who is the mirror of everything young Lea doesn’t want to be. Lea has a boyfriend, Javier, with the eyes of a wolf, and a best friend, Catalina, who cries every day; she also has Marcos, a boy who leaves her presents on her doormat but only knows how to be clumsy and violent. Now Lea has some new neighbors, and she doesn’t trust them because she knows that families only leave the City for the Small Town when someone has stopped loving them.