Coastal Passage

On a winter morning in Normandy, Guillermo Trilla wakes from a dream he cannot hold on to: three boys walking all night beneath rain, across fields and villages, toward a mountain. The image fades, but not its unease.

Guillermo is a Spanish teacher, writer, expatriate, husband, and father, a man whose days are divided between a French lycée, books, family, and a sister-city project linking Vitraux with Sajará, the Mediterranean town of his memory. After three years of meetings, delegations, translations, political maneuvering, cultural misunderstandings, ceremonial dinners, and absurd civic rituals, he has decided to resign. What should be a minor bureaucratic ending instead opens a passage through the landscapes that have formed him.

As the novel moves between Normandy and Sajará, present and recollection, public comedy and private meditation, Guillermo revisits lost political hopes, childhood, exile, literature, language, desire, death, and the stubborn question of whether time is truly linear. Freud, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Saint-Exupéry, Monet, Balzac, and other presences enter naturally into his thought, not as decoration but as fellow travelers in an ongoing conversation with the past.

Then snow begins to fall.

After his final committee meeting, familiar roads vanish beneath a white, trackless night. Guillermo loses his way, runs low on fuel, and eventually continues on foot. The landscape grows increasingly difficult to separate from memory, dream, and myth. An old adolescent journey returns with startling clarity. A distant manor appears where no destination should be. And a woman seems to have been waiting for him.

By turns ironic, philosophical, comic, and quietly gothic, Coastal Passage is a novel about displacement and belonging, the persistence of memory, the consolations and dangers of literature, and the uncertain boundary between waking life and the worlds we carry within us. It follows a man who has spent years moving between countries, languages, loyalties, and versions of himself, until a winter night asks him the simplest and most difficult question of all: where, in the end, is home?