He showed me his scars, a fine mesh covering his forearms and back like internal branches, as if he were carrying a tree. Then he saw mine. We felt light, a little ugly and very beautiful. Two survivors.

Fracture is a story about the beauty that emerges from broken things.

Mr Watanabe is a victim of one of the largest collective traumas of the last century and a fugitive from his own memory. A survivor of the atomic bombs dropped in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he has evaded the trauma of those experiences for most of his adult life. When the earthquake which precedes the Fukushima nuclear disaster strikes, the past becomes present and Mr Watanabe begins a journey that will change everything.

Meanwhile, four women based in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and Madrid tell their own stories of knowing and loving Mr Watanabe to an enigmatic Argentine journalist, their intimate criss-crossed perspectives revealing how each human event expands far beyond the place it occurred and how every society remembers and forgets its catastrophes.

Written with compassion, intimacy and purpose, Fracture encompasses some of the most urgent political, social and environmental questions of contemporary life, about collective trauma, memory and love. Already a sensation in Spain, it is a major work of imagination from the prize-winning and highly acclaimed Argentinian author.