Intro -- One -- Depends Who's Telling the Joke -- Write Your Mother When You Can -- The Julio Verne Diary -- Juan Pablo Would Have Loved This -- You'll Thank Me One Day -- Juan Pablo Would Have Loved This, Too -- Two -- The La Virtud Diary -- I'd Been Imagining a Less Conventional Story -- Tell Your Mother More About Her -- If You Don't Want to Tell Me Then Don't Tell Me -- The Lawyer Isn't Going to Like This One Bit -- It's All for My Cousin's Benefit -- Four Sunny Days -- Looks Like a Panic Attack -- I Just Can't Believe I'm Dead -- Three -- You Sure This Guy Isn't Retarded? -- In No Time at All I'm Going to Be Expendable -- Call Your Mother Right Away -- No News from Juan Pablo -- Epilogue -- Your Mother Knows Stories Are Never Finished Till You Get to the End -- Warning: Contains Language - A Translator's Afterword -- Note to the Reader -- Current and Upcoming Books
Summary:
'I don't expect anyone to believe me,' warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship when he's kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement. The gangsters are threatening his cousin--a wannabe entrepreneur known to some as 'Projects' and to others as 'dickhead' - who is gagged and tied to a chair. The thugs say Juan Pablo must work for them. His mission? To make Laia, the daughter of a corrupt politician, fall in love with him. He accepts . . . though not before the crime boss has forced him at gunpoint into a discussion on the limits of humour in literature.
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