Critically acclaimed, prize-winning author Andres Neuman’s Fracture is an ambitious literary novel set against Japan’s 2011 nuclear accident in a cross-cultural story about how every society remembers and forgets its catastrophes.
An earthquake unnerves Tokyo on March 11, 2011, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster-and a tectonic stirring of the collective past. Mr. Yoshie Watanabe, an aging executive at an electronics company and a survivor of the atomic bomb, feels as though he is a fugitive of his own memory. As the seams of his country threaten to come undone yet again, he braces himself to make the biggest decision of his life.
Meanwhile, four women narrate their own memories of Watanabe to an enigmatic Argentinian reporter investigating his life. Their stories, told in different languages and describing different loves, map a sociopolitical tour of Tokyo, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid, proving that nothing ever happens in one place, that every human event reverberates to the ends of the earth.

Searching for an inn, the enigmatic traveler Hans stops in a small city on the border between Saxony and Prussia. The next morning, Hans meets an old organ-grinder in the market square and immediately finds himself enmeshed in an intense debate-on identity and what it is that defines us-from which he cannot break free.
Indefinitely stuck in Wandernburg until his debate with the organ-grinder is concluded, he begins to meet the various characters who populate the town, including a young freethinker named Sophie. Though she is engaged to be married, Sophie and Hans begin a relationship that defies contemporary mores about female sexuality and what can and cannot be said about it.
Traveler of the Century is a deeply intellectual novel, chock-full of discussions about philosophy, history, literature, love, and translation. It is a book that looks to the past in order to have us reconsider the conflicts of our present. The winner of Spain’s prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Traveler of the Century marks the English-language debut of Andres Neuman, a writer described by Roberto Bolaño as being “touched by grace.”