Empty Runway

For the past month, Barcelona’s El Prat airport has kept its passengers locked inside for reasons no one can quite explain. Among the more than five thousand souls wandering its terminals, two Chilean brothers — estranged for years and on their way to Turkey for a hair transplant — set off on a desperate search: that of their father, a quiet widower who was supposed to accompany them to the place where they would try to correct their genetic inheritance, but who has vanished somewhere in the airport’s maze.

Along the way, they encounter a punk who hides his face behind a baby mask to escape his past, a Mexican anarchist leading an international operation against an indie festival, and a group of bullfighters who organize clandestine child races. Between absurdity and melancholy humor, the search for their father becomes a search for themselves.

A novel about family, displacement, and the twisted shapes masculinity can take, it reconstructs the story of an immigrant family between Chile and Spain while revealing the intimate cracks that open when three lost men are forced to truly see one another for the first time.