The President's Room Ricardo Romero 9781999722722

A taut, appealing, and often quite funny exploration of existential angst."-Kirkus Reviews

In a nameless suburb in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It's simply how things are, and no one seems to question it except for one young boy.The room is kept clean and tidy, nobody talks about it and nobody is allowed to use it. It is for the president and no one else. But what if he doesn't come? And what if he does? As events unfold, the reader is kept in the dark about what's really going on. So much so, in fact, that we begin to wonder if even the narrator can be trusted...Ricardo Romero has been compared to Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino, and we see why in this eerie, meditative novel narrated by a shy young boy who seems to be very good at lying about the truth. Following in the footsteps of Julio Cortazar and a certain literary tradition of sinister rooms (such as Dr Jekyll's laboratory), The President's Room is a mysterious tale based on the suspicion that a house is never just one single home.

Ricardo Romero was born in the province of Entre Rios, in northern Argentina, in 1976, and now lives in Buenos Aires. Between 2003 and 2006 he ran the literary journal Oliverio and between 2006 and 2010 he was one of the members of El Quinteto de la Muerte (The Lethal Quintet), with which he published two books: 5 and La Fiesta de la Narrativa (The Fiction Party).

Charlotte Coombe is a British literary translator, working from French and Spanish. Her translation of Abousse Shalmani's Khomeini, Sade and Me (2016) won a PEN Translates award. She has translated novels by Anna Soler-Pont and Asha Miro, Marc de Gouvenain, as well as some non-fiction, short stories and poetry by Edgardo Nunez Caballero, Rosa Maria Roffiel and Santiago Roncagliolo for Palabras Errantes . She is also the translator of Eduardo Berti's novel The Imagined Land (2018). She has translated three titles for Charco Press: Ricardo Romero's The President's Room (2017) and Margarita Garcia Robayo's Fish Soup (2018) and Holiday Heart (2020).

"Romero's haunting fantasy, about the poetics of space and the edges of reality, underlines how impressive is the fiction currently emerging from an inspired Argentina." -The Times Literary Supplement

"Romero's short novel, with its brief sections creating the haunting atmosphere depicted by a breathless young narrator, will undoubtedly reward re-readings." -Asymptote