All narrative, including that which intends to imitate life, is a fiction, an artifice. Starting with that premise, in his latest novel, Tiempo de vida, Marcos Giralt Torrente deals with a universal theme: the death of one’s father. The novel won the Spanish 2011 National Narrative Prize. Winner of the 1999 Herralde Novel Prize for his novel París, his also the author of Los seres felices and contributes regularly as a literary critic to Babelia, the cultural supplement of the newspaper El País.