In this quartet of mesmerizing stories, Marcos Giralt Torrente explores the confounding, double-edged promise of love. Each finds a man carefully churning over his past, trying to fathom how the distance between people can become suddenly unbridgeable.

Two tourists visit a remote island off the coast of Africa and are undone by a disconcerting encounter with another couple. A young man, enchanted by his bohemian cousin and her husband, watches them fall into a state of resentful dependence over the course of decades. A chaste but all-consuming love affair between a troubled boy and a wealthy but equally troubled girl leaves a scar that never heals. The son of divorced parents tries in vain to reunite them before realizing why he is wrong to do so. In The End of Love, Giralt Torrente forges discomfiting and gripping dramas from the small but consequential misunderstandings that shape our lives.

Marcos Giralt Torrente is author of the story collection Entiéndame(Understand Me), his celebrated literary debut, the novel París (Paris) which won the Herralde Novel Award in 1999, and the novella Nada sucede solo (Nothing Happens By Itself). He was writer-in-residence at the Spanish Academy in Rome, the Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf and the University of Aberdeen, and was part of the Berlin Artists-in-Residence Programme in 2002-2003. His second novel was entitled Los seres felices (The Happy Beings) and his third, Tiempo de vida (Life Time) met with significant critical and public acclaim, winning the Spanish National Book Award for Fiction in 2011, and is currently in its fifth edition. His latest book, the short story collection El final del amor (The End of Love), was the winner of the International Short Fiction Award Ribera del Duero in 2011, the highest endowed award for story collections in Spain.