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Antonio Muñoz Molina

Your Steps on the Stairs: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Antonio Muñoz Molina (Author), Curtis Bauer (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition

101 ratings

3.4 on Goodreads

957 ratings

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A couple’s new life in Lisbon unravels in this heady and unsettling psychological thriller from one of Spain’s most celebrated writers.

A man travels to Lisbon ahead of his wife to prepare their new home, while she stays in New York to oversee a research project on the neuroscience of memory and fear. Leaving behind a phase of their relationship indelibly marked by 9/11, the man revels in the Portuguese capital’s temperate weather and the neighborhood’s calmness, meticulously planning the details of their future.

Yet beneath the peace and quiet of this routine, he feels a growing unease he can’t explain. Is it the similarity between the two cities, and the two apartments? A mysterious threat waiting in the wings?

A brilliant, deceptively simple novel of psychological suspense, Your Steps on the Stairs explores how our emotions and memories shape our perception of reality. With his subtle, masterful style, Antonio Muñoz Molina lays bare the fragility of the stories we so carefully craft about ourselves.

Print length

305 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Other Press
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Publication date

April 8 2025
File size

1.2 MB
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Product description

Review

“An anxious, unconventional thriller by Muñoz Molina, a literary superstar in Spain…Reading this book, which has been elegantly translated by Curtis Bauer, feels like hearing a constant alarm ringing in a neighbor’s house. You’ll want to read the ending more than once.” —New York Times Book Review, Best Thrillers of the Month

“In a cool, controlled translation…Your Steps on the Stairs builds to a crescendo of suspense by enveloping the reader in the narrator’s memories, obsessions, and, it becomes increasingly clear, delusions…This novel possesses the eerie melancholy of a work of crime noir, where the nemesis is some truth too intolerable to face with open eyes.” —Wall Street Journal

“[A] disquieting psychological suspense novel…Anxiety and dread mount steadily, while elegiac prose and eccentric supporting characters amplify the story’s surrealism straight through to the sucker-punch ending. It’s a stunning blend of mystery and literary fever dream.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Originally published in Spain in 2019, this psychologically informed exploration of loss may resonate even more with readers in our current tumultuous moment.” —Booklist

“An effective reflection of [the narrator’s] tragic self-deceit—and also, perhaps, of a universal fear of abandonment.” —Times Literary Supplement

“A novel of delusion…and of coping with trauma…well done.” —Complete Review

“Molina is a beautiful writer. He has the talent for describing mundane tasks and ordinary days that make these encounters seem fascinating and special…Your Steps on the Stairs will resonate with many who share Bruno’s fears for where we are now and where we are headed.” —Woman Around Town

“A masterly subtle trip into the mind of a man waiting for his wife amidst his apocalypse, Your Steps on the Stairs dissects the myriad distractions and deceits we cope with in this dystopic-modern world. In prose spun so expertly it leaves you daydreaming inside the elusive Lisbon and New York City of this novel, Muñoz Molina achieves a reverberant psychological unraveling that will suspend, overturn, and consume your optimism for reality.” —Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming

Praise for In Her Absence:

“[An] elegant, precise, and inimitable novel…nothing less than extraordinary.” —Washington Post

“Muñoz Molina layers a subtle satire of artistic hypocrisy with a stirring account of class separation.” —The New Yorker

“In this gem of a novella, Antonio Muñoz Molina deftly chronicles the trajectory of a failing marriage.” —San Francisco Chronicle --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Antonio Muñoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, including Sepharad, A Manuscript of Ashes, and In Her Absence. He has been awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society and the Prince of Asturias Award, among many others. Muñoz Molina lives in Madrid and New York City.

Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond’s Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

I’ve moved tothis city to wait for the end of the world. The conditions couldn’t be better. The apartment is on a quiet street. From the balcony you can see the river in the distance. You can also see it from the small kitchen patio, which overlooks the back gardens and balconies along the adjoining street, the enclosed balconies with iron railings where clothes are hanging, fluttering in the breeze. At the end of the street, beyond the river, the horizon of hills on the other bank and the Cristo Rei with his open arms, as if he were about to take flight. In Siberia there are, at this very moment, temperatures above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. In Sweden, fires fueled by unprecedented heat ravage the forests that extend above the Arctic Circle. In California, fires spanning hundreds of thousands of acres have been raging for several months in a row, and they are given their own names, like hurricanes in the Caribbean. Here, days dawn fresh and serene. Every morning there’s a damp, bright-white mist the sun breaks through slowly as it carries the strong scent of the sea upriver. Swallows skim across the sky and fly over the rooftops, like they did in the cool summer mornings of my childhood. As soon as Cecilia arrives I won’t need anything else. The end of the world has most likely already started, but it still seems far away from this place. Airplanes fly in all day, from before dawn until after midnight, coming across the sky from the south, just above the Cristo Rei, spreading his reinforced concrete arms out like a superhero about to launch himself into the air. Immense cruise ships glide up the river, looking like vertical housing developments for tourists, floating replicas of Benidorm or Miami Beach. There’s nothing better to take your mind off waiting than to look out over a balcony or a park railing and watch the ships pass by on a large, sea-wide river. Light sailboats and tankers with rusty, cliff-like hulls drift along. From a nearby street I can see the container wharf crane along the shoreline of the river. In the glare of the nocturnal floodlights, the crane moves back and forth like a robotic spider, one of those spiders grown monstrous from the effects of atomic radiation in some futuristic movie from the 1950s. From the kitchen patio, where Cecilia and I will soon start planting vegetables in raised beds filled with fertile soil, above the balconies and rooftops and the brick chimney of an old factory, I can see the top of one of the bridge towers, faded red against the soft-blue sky. The always-present background rumble comes from the traffic on the bridge: the cars and trucks and the trains on the lower deck; and there’s also the vibration of the pillars and metal plates under the weight and tremor of the traffic, and the cables quivering like harp strings in the wind. The bridge and the whole river and the hills on the other bank and the container wharfs and the Cristo Rei, I see all of it every morning from the little park where I take Luria for a walk. If I walk beside her, she sniffs through the bushes, runs behind the pigeons, digs and plunges her snout into the ground. If I sit on a bench and stare out at the river and the incoming planes, Luria sits at my side contemplating the same spectacle in a perfect wait-and-see attitude, her nose raised, her gaze fixed on a distance that her myopic eyes will only vaguely be able to make out. If I pull a book out of my bag and start reading, she seems to take over for me, and her attention intensifies.

2

Maybe I've settledinto this new life so quickly because there are a certain number of things in common with the one we left behind. Maybe the similarities influenced us unconsciously when we chose this part of the city and this apartment. Every day I observe repetitions and echoes that I hadn’t noticed before. Most of our decisive mental operations take place in the brain without our consciousness being aware of them, Cecilia says. The Cristo Rei on the opposite riverbank was a disturbance at first, a mistake on the landscape: the first day in our Lisbon hotel, Cecilia opened the window and saw it in the distance and because she was still a little dazed from jet lag, she told me that for an absurd moment she had the mistaken impression that she was in Rio de Janeiro, where she had been a few weeks earlier for one of her conferences on the human brain. Then she had to come to Lisbon, and it was on that particular trip I was able to join her. She would attend her scientific seminars and I would wander around the city and wait for her at the hotel or in a café, relieved not to be in New York and that I wasn’t working. The hotel was quiet and tidy, like one of those friendly English hotels, not a real one but one from some movie, with clean rugs and no musty smell. We opened the curtains in the room when we arrived and we saw the river and the piers all at once. There was a library on the third floor with dark, wood-lined walls, old leather armchairs, a fireplace, a gilded copper telescope, a large picture window, a terrace facing the river. The bridge loomed in the background. The strands of lights came on early in the December dusk, in a drizzling fog. Huddled in bed as if inside a burrow, we listened to the bells, chiming in a church tower and announcing each hour. Sated afterward, appeased, hungry, we went out to search for a place to have dinner, along uninhabited, scarcely lit streets. The white-stone sidewalks were slippery with the condensation from the mist. It didn’t seem likely that we would find a restaurant in such an out-of-the-way neighborhood and at such an hour. As we climbed a flight of steps we saw a lighted corner at the end of the street; a quiet murmur of voices, cutlery, and dishes trickled out of it. It was a low structure, like an unexpected country house, painted pink, with a bougainvillea covering half the facade and the window. When we came in from the deserted street we were even more pleased to see the animated diners and waiters. It was an Italian restaurant. There were a lot of people, but they were still able to seat us. The waiters, cordial and efficient, looked Italian, but they were all Nepalese. To have stumbled across that restaurant and then savor a flavorful pasta dish and an inexpensive light-red wine, some tiramisu, an ice-cold grappa, nourished our inner joy, our gratitude toward randomness, an unforgettable trattoria in Lisbon run by people from Nepal. Then we got lost exploring the unfamiliar places that are now part of my everyday life, the normal life we are about to begin in our quiet and sheltered wait for the world to collapse. “A river like the Hudson,” Cecilia said, a little drunk, happy, unsteady in her high heels on those climbs and descents, “a bridge like the George Washington Bridge.” In a nearby church a bell tolled the hour. “The clock tower like the one on Riverside Church,” I said: and at that moment, that night I never want to forget, in every one of its secret nuances, neither of us imagined anything yet, though it is possible that we passed along this street, under this balcony I am now peering over.

3

We were inNew York and now we’re going to be in Lisbon. For the time being I’m in Lisbon. I’m using my time to make all the preparations for when Cecilia arrives. There was a container in one of those giant freighters that go up the Tagus transporting all our things, so many years, our two lives, each other’s books and the books we shared, the outdated CDs we gave each other at the beginning of our relationship, the photos that were still printed and framed at that time, the heavy winter clothes we didn’t realize we would no longer need, one of Cecelia’s lined coats that reached down to her feet, with its fur-trimmed hood, and the coat that made me look like an Eskimo. I’ll have to ask Alexis, who knows everything, if there’s some organization in Lisbon where we can donate all these clothes. Reading Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s memoirs about the Antarctic has made me nostalgic for those winters. I packed Cecilia’s long coat away in a closet and remembered how her face looked in the cold, the fur cap over her eyebrows, the reddened tip of her nose, the pink luster on her cheeks. It’s been exhausting, but now I’m glad I rushed the move without waiting for her to return. It was quite a feat to move things along so quickly in a city where life seems to happen at a much slower pace.

I’ve also had, we’ve had, the good fortune that, in a moment of absolute crisis, Alexis appeared, leading his infallible team of assistants, accomplices rather, colluding in their various tasks, in their practical knowledge, all of which Alexis himself seems to master effortlessly. The poetry of a new city runs the risk of being snuffed out without a trace when one is in the process of settling in. Time was running out, and I was paralyzed by inefficiency and anxiety. I called phone numbers no one answered. When someone finally answered after I’d been waiting for half an hour listening to a musical recording that played the same songs over and over, I couldn’t understand what they were saying and I wasn’t able to explain myself in Portuguese. Someone assured me he would come to install something or deliver something and then he never showed up. I’d spend the day waiting, sitting on an unopened box with the label of an American moving company on it. Luria waited with me. Luria is even more talented than I am at waiting. Luria welcomes even the slowest or most incompetent workers with her unflagging enthusiasm for the human species. The sky was dark and low, and it rained nonstop. Day after day the garbage continued to pile up next to the overflowing dumpsters on the street. More than the inconvenience, I was weighed down by the superstition that because of those mishaps our future life in the city would be ruined, our unfinished apartment would be tainted with failure. I didn’t want to say anything to Cecilia because I was afraid that she would wait to come. But I also didn’t want her to come and find herself in the middle of such a mess, with such deplorable living and work conditions. One day Alexis showed up, to install I don’t know what, and he arrived at the exact time he had told me he would be coming, with his phone in one hand and his toolbox in the other, wearing a workman’s belt where all kinds of screwdrivers, various gadgets, and clusters of sonorous keys were hanging. I opened the door, and before he entered Alexis bowed, as if making some kind of Japanese greeting, while wiping the soles of his boots on the doormat. He said “com licença,” and glided through the gap in the doorway before I could open it all the way, agile as a scuba diver or an expert at escaping from traps or safes, a true Houdini of every kind of domestic job. He looked around, his appraisal precise and no doubt tinged with a little pity, at the sorry state of everything: the piled-up boxes, the partially unpacked furniture still inside its plastic and cardboard liners and packing tape, the dank cold of an apartment that had been uninhabited for several months, not to mention the half-painted walls, which had been abandoned by a handyman who had very politely left one afternoon and never returned, and the paint cans, rags, and pages of newspapers spread out across the floor. Alexis is from the Argentine interior, but over the years his accent has diminished substantially, and he has acquired a certain Portuguese formality. He says that since he left Argentina he has been suffering from the bad reputation, not undeserved in his opinion, of his compatriots in Buenos Aires. He comes from the tropical province of Misiones. Luria rolled onto her back next to him to show her excitement and encourage him to rub her belly. Alexis, ever so formal, lay down beside her and, after rolling around on the floor with her, got back to his feet in a simple, springlike motion. “El señor is going to see how all of this gets straightened out. You, sir, can promise Señora Cecilia that when she arrives everything will be in order, ready and waiting for her arrival just as she deserves.” --This text refers to the paperback edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0D93CRHXG
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Other Press
Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 8 2025
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1.2 MB
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 305 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1635424355
Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled
�鶹�� Rank: #15,432 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #3 in Spanish & Portuguese Literature
- #436 in Psychological Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #752 in Psychological Thrillers (Kindle Store)
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101 ratings

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BDrury
Best novel in awhile.
Reviewed in Canada on July 5, 2025
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A wonderful read. I recommend it.

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DOUGLAS
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Reviewed in Canada on June 24, 2025
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The Translator fails to provide the nuance that only the Spanish original has. Of course if you don't read Spanish and you want to give this a try, go ahead it's a good story.
A more experienced Translator would have been preferred.

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Angie
Excellent Translation
Reviewed in Canada on April 9, 2025
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This is an incredibly well written book. I’ve read it in Spanish. I bought this English language book to compare it to the Spanish edition and it’s just as wonderful in English. I strongly recommend reading this book.

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Susan Bass
An exercise in quiet suspense
Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2025
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Bruno has transported his New York life to Lisbon where he reassembles it and waits for his beloved Cecelia to join him. This is a novel about many things. It is about the innumerable things we do for love, and about the innumerable ways we can know the beloved. It is a novel about waiting. Like the centurion who never leaves his post, Bruno is dedicated to his mission of waiting. It is also, in the end, about the effects of waiting and of obsession—the terrible brokenness of a soul that cannot do anything else . This novel is a masterpiece.

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David P. Schafer
A long trip to nowhere special
Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2025
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Not a bad novel, I just didn’t find it as gripping or upsetting as others seemed to. Well written, but just OK in my opinion.

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Laura
spellbinding
Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2025
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This is not your ordinary psychological thriller. It's not full of twists and turns and dead bodies. Instead, it's a quietly devastating novel full of unease and low level suspense. The major standout, though, is the writing. The writing is so good that even the most mundane activities seem important and fascinating, and the painful hope of the unreliable narrator becomes your own.

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MJ
Short and Very Strange
Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2025
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I have read everything this author writes. This book is very strange. At first, the events told by a man waiting for his wife seem logical and then they do not. Stories from acquaintances and friends clash. The man and his dog continue to wait and you may or may not know the answer.

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Shopper
Good mystery reading
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2025
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Unsettling mystery that keeps you engaged..

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