I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me
Now a new feature film available on Netflix!
Juan Pablo Villalobos author Daniel Hahn translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:And Other Stories
Published:30th Apr '20
Should be back in stock very soon

Winner of the 2016 Herralde Prize
“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.
Part campus novel, part gangster thriller, I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me is Villalobos at his best. Exuberantly foul-mouthed and intellectually agile, this hugely entertaining novel finds the light side of difficult subjects—immigration, corruption, family loyalty and love—in a world where the difference between comedy and tragedy depends entirely on who’s telling the joke.
Praise for Juan Pablo Villalobos:
'Funny, convincing, appalling...a punch-packer.' Ali Smith
'Savagely funny.' Lili Wright, New York Times
'Hilariously cutting, furnished with highly stylized coarse humor, Juan Pablo Villalobos’ novels do not follow any rules, other than the logic of the absurd . . . The author’s intelligence steers us through the jokes and disasters, and especially the nonsense, which he redeems with a leavening sarcasm that turns reading the book into a highly valuable act of literary renewal.'
-- Francisco Solano * El Pa�ISBN: 9781911508489
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 336g
288 pages