by Antonio Soler

translated by Kathryn Phillips-Miles & Simon Deefholts

Synopsis

An elderly Spaniard ekes out an existence managing the reception desk in a seedy hotel in Toronto. Another elderly Spaniard checks in, triggering a flood of memories, back to the days when both men were activists in a revolutionary cell in Barcelona, days of armed resistence, action and adventure, romance and betrayal . . .

Reviews

In English: The Modern Novel

In Spanish: bestialectora.com

The Author

Antonio Soler was born in Málaga in 1956. His writing career began in 1992 with the publication of Extranjeros en la noche (Strangers in the Night), a collection of short stories and a novella. Since then, he has published more than a dozen novels, many of them award-winning, including El camino de los ingleses (Summer Rain), which was made into a film in 2006 by Antonio Banderas.

The Alligator’s Trap is the third novel by Antonio Soler to be published in English, following Sur (Peter Owen/Pushkin Press, 2023) and Soldiers in the Fog (The Clapton Press, 2023).

Sur was long-listed for the prestigious Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, 2024.

Cover design by Ivana Nohel

ISBN 978-1-013693-38-1

Original title: El sueño del caimán

The translation of this work was made possible with the financial assistance of the Ministry of Culture of Spain through the Directorate General for Books, Comics and Reading.