In this deliriously inventive twist on The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Argentine Diego Muzzio infuses classic gothic atmosphere with disturbingly modern psychological horror.In an old sanatorium on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Dr Edward Pierce develops experimental therapies to treat patients traumatised by the First World War. Late one night, he receives a visitor who asks him to take on a bizarre case: David Bradley, an engineer who was sent to inspect the conditions of a lighthouse on a desolate island in southern Argentina. This once rational, disciplined man returned completely mute, his body overwhelmed by a single compulsion: to swim and swim, in any environment, to the point of total exhaustion. As Pierce becomes fixated on Bradley's diary, a macabre record of his increasing derangement, he explores strange new treatments in which the lines between doctor and patient begin dangerously to blur.



Diego Muzzio was born in Buenos Aires and currently lives in France. An author of poetry and fiction for children and adults, he has won several literary awards, including the Premio Hispanoamericano de Poesía Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the 2023 Fundación Medifé Filba Award for The Eye of Goliath, which is his first novel.



Reads like a classic but with everything that classic books were unable to articulate: mental health, war trauma, the inexorability of violence... Impossible to stop reading. It has all the fascinating tension of great literature



A literary feat - precise, and meticulous, with nods to classic authors and multiple layers of interpretation. It's a majestic descent into pure horror



A narrative tour de force of echoes and doubles



A revelation of style and form that probes many contemporary issues in spite of being set in the first decades of the 20th century



This might be the closest I've come to reading a cursed book, in the best way possible. Truly disturbing. At times it feels like reading a forgotten classic, and at others like something that wasn't meant to be read. It genuinely gave me nightmares