The most personal book from one of the breakout voices in Spanish literature. A powerful true story about life, love, death, and literature.
«Oxígeno confirms that Marta Jiménez Serrano belongs to the same literary homeland as Zadie Smith, Nora Ephron, and Joan Didion. An emotional, precise text full of class rage, turning the blink between life and death into a universe of possibilities, into life itself refusing to give up.» Alana Portero
«Here is a strange sentence: I knew what it was like to be dying.»
In November 2020, just months before publishing her first novel, the author nearly died. On an ordinary Saturday, at home, without knowing it, she and her partner were dying. A leak in the boiler released carbon monoxide, and the gas was putting them to sleep until Marta, barely able, got up to go to the bathroom. There she collapsed and hit her head. It took five years to tell that experience in a story that combines narrative tension, anxiety, and hope.
Oxígeno is "the book I never wanted to write": the account of the minutes when life was slipping away, the months following the accident, and the years before it, when they fell in love and began building a life without thinking it could end at any moment. With sensitivity, humor, and clarity, the author faces death head-on to celebrate the everyday wonder of still being here.
"One of the most talented and intelligent writers of her generation." Laura Barrachina
