By Rodrigo Hasbún
Translated by Lily Meyer
“It’s impossible to get a single answer from the past. It’s not a key to anything. It’s just a place we go to trick ourselves.”
Publication Date: February 24th, 2026
Hardcover: 9781646054152
eBook: 9781646054169
Description
Andrea and Julián haven’t seen one another in twenty-one years—not since that tragic, fateful night their senior year of high school that marked their group of friends forever. A shocking phone call brings the two together again in Houston, where they begin to unravel the truth of that year, picking open long scabbed-over wounds from their upper-class adolescence in 1990s Bolivia and the scandal that ripped them apart.
A writer unhappy in his career and his marriage, Julián has been novelizing the past for his next book, trying to make meaning out of the events that changed the course of their lives forever. “I’d thought that writing about that time would free me, relieve the burden of the invisible years,” he writes, “but often it seems that it’s done the reverse.” Juxtaposing the naïve invincibility of adolescence with the grasping uncertainties of adulthood, The Invisible Years deftly weaves a coming-of-age tale that leaves the reader hanging on every word, even as they know how the cards fall in the end.
Biographical Information
Rodrigo Hasbún (b.1981) is a Bolivian novelist of Palestinian descent. He is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories. In 2007 he was selected by the Hay Festival as one of the Bogota’s best Latin American authors under the age of 39. In 2010 he was chosen as one of Granta’s Twenty Best Spanish writers under the age of 35. His work has appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. His second novel, Affections, received an English PEN Award and has been published in twelve languages. Hasbún is now living and working in Houston.
Lily Meyer is a translator, critic, and author of the novel Short War (Deep Vellum). A contributing writer at The Atlantic, her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird (Deep Vellum) and Ice for Martians (Columbia University Press). Her novel The End of Romance is forthcoming from Viking.