Learning to Lose

It is Sylvia’s sixteenth birthday, and her life as an adult is about to begin—not with the party she had been planning, but with a car accident and a broken leg. Behind the wheel is a talented young soccer player, just arrived from Buenos Aires and set for stardom on and off the field. As their destinies collide and a young romance is set in motion, across town, Sylvia’s father and grandfather are finding their own lives suddenly derailed by a violent murder and a secret affair with a prostitute.

Set against the maze of Madrid’s congested and contested streets, Learning to Lose follows these four individuals as they swerve off course in unexpected directions. Each of them is dodging guilt and the fear of failure, but their shared search for happiness, love, purity, redemption, and, above all, a way to survive, forms a taut narrative web that binds the characters together.

From one of Spain’s most celebrated contemporary writers, Learning to Lose is a lucid and gripping view into the complexities of lives overturned and into the capriciousness of modern life, with its intoxicating highs and devastating lows.

While a car collision involving 16-year-old Sylvia and a young soccer player from Buenos Aires blossoms into a love affair, Sylvia's father and grandfather find their lives derailed by a violent murder and a secret affair, in a novel set amid the hustle and bustle of Madrid. By the author of Four Friends. Original.

David Trueba was born in Madrid in 1969 and has been successful both as a

novelist and as a scriptwriter. La buena vida was his widely acclaimed debut as a

film director and was followed by Obra Maestra (2001), Soldados de Salamina

(2003), Bienvenido a casa (2006), and La silla de Fernando (2007). He is also

the author of two previous novels; his debut, Four Friends, sold over 100,000 copies with twenty reprints. Learning to Lose won the Critics Award in 2009.

Mara Faye Lethem is the translator of Spanish and Catalan authors such as

Albert Snchez Piol, Juan Mars, Javier Calvo, Jorge Semprn, and Pablo DeSantis. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she has lived in Barcelona since 2003.