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Hello and welcome to The Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator,

and this week I am joined by Andres Neumann. He's a Argentinian-born novelist who now lives in Spain,

and he's been routinely showered with awards and prizes, and he's been named one of Grant's best of young Spanish language novelists.

Andres' new novel is called Fracture.

It's published just imminently in the UK, in fabulous translation,

and it tells the story of an elderly Japanese man who, as a boy survived the double bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the present day of the novel

is set around the disaster in the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan all these years later.

Andres, welcome. Can you tell me a bit about why, you know, you as a sort of South American,

Spaniard, chose to write about somebody Japanese.

It's a pleasure and thank you for this conversation. I'm sure we're going to enjoy it.

As for your first question, the first quote from the novel is by a poet, the great Polish poet,

Miwosh, who wrote, if something exists somewhere, it will exist everywhere.

Just think nowadays, environmentally speaking, that's a key idea, really, and not to mention the

pandemic. The pandemic we're fighting now only shows how short-sighted or dangerous even.

It would be to believe that what happens on the rest of countries or cultures has nothing

to do with our own lives.

There are actually no borders for what matters the most, I think.

And the novel constantly plays with what we could call borderless forces that can affect everybody

everywhere such as energy economy fear and love of course but secondly this mysterious

japanese man actually spends most of his life abroad and that how it connects with my own displacement. I was born in

...