I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me Malek Haddad Nikolaids’ prose is precise and

Nikolaids’ prose is precise and bitingly funny and his protagonists hopeless misanthropes: from the local sleuth who sacrifices truth for the sake of telling his clients the stories they want to hear to the local reporter who discovers that his own past was concocted by Yugoslav secret services and enters a state of time-travelling paranoia

and lives in Barry

and the intricacies of tiny daily obsessive practices

many not seen before

He is a political commissar to the British troops among the International Brigades

I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me Malek Haddad Nikolaids’ prose is precise andI dont expect anyone to believe me, warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship when hes kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement. The gangsters are threatening his cousina wannabe entrepreneur known to some as Projects and to others as dickheadwho is gagged and tied to a chair. The thugs say Juan Pablo must work for them. His mission? To make