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The Back Yard is an intimate and universal story on life, disenchantment and grief. The author of Baudelaire’s Flowers, sets his sight on family conflicts, in the injustice of some of our society’s approaches, in the difficulty of facing our own fate.

The main character, Pablo, is a young man of the eighties who has started to study law and lives with his family in an apartment that gives out onto a courtyard. On weekends he goes out with his friends to get drunk; he’s had some girlfriend or other and belongs to a literary circle that has helped with the publication of a very controversial article of his in a newspaper. His parents feel he is distant, aloof and in conflict with the world—a common attitude in the great majority of adolescents. However, one day, facing the surprise and bewilderment of his parents, he opens the dining room window and jumps out into the void.

The Back Yard combines two interior monologues—father and son—who retell a difficult family history, mixing intimate thoughts, mutual reproaches, social criticism and the search for answers.

This novel joins a long literary tradition –such as Letter to His Father, by Kafka or Demian, by Herman Hesse—, where father/son relationships are a cause of constant incomprehension.

Of his previous novel, Baudelaire’s Flowers, the critics have said:

“Gonzalo Garrido triumphs with this novel with an amateur detective as the main character.” ABC

“It is the author’s first novel but the truth is that doesn’t look like it, by the ease with which the story is told.” El Correo

“It marks the fortunate debut of a writer who has come to stay.” Diario Noticias