Love in Lowercase

December 14, 2015
This novel, the quirky tale of Barcelona linguistics professor Samuel, a mysterious cat named Mishima, and the bumpy road to love, is an international bestseller in its original Spanish edition. As the tale begins on New Year’s Eve, Samuel is predicting that the coming year will be as uneventful and predictable as those that preceded it—until a cat mysteriously shows up at his apartment and makes itself at home. While seeking to find out where the cat came from, Samuel meets eccentric neighbors, rediscovers a childhood love, and ultimately comes to realize that love can be found anywhere, if one looks for it. Miralles’s endearing romantic comedy should become as big a hit Stateside as it has been elsewhere in the world.

November 1, 2015
A series of surprising events lends a solitary bachelor a second chance at love. Samuel, a linguistics lecturer in Madrid, lives a reclusive life of teaching, lesson-planning, and housework--a routine in which the greatest thrill is an occasional trip to the supermarket. He's eschewed a social life for so long that he ushers in the New Year watching TV alone in his apartment and criticizing the revelers outside. But all that changes on New Year's Day when he wakes up to the scratchings of a cat on his apartment door. The cat takes up residence in Samuel's home and forces him to interact with the messy outside world--by escaping to the apartment upstairs, where Samuel encounters a philosophizing editor named Titus, who sends him on an errand where he crosses paths with Gabriela, his lost childhood love. Along the way Samuel learns the importance of what he terms "love in lowercase"--a phenomenon in which "some small act of kindness sets off a chain of events that comes around again in the form of multiplied love"--inspiring him to enjoy life's smaller moments and seek out Gabriela. The quest to find Gabriela is genuinely charming if a little predictable, and Samuel, full of awkwardness and good intentions, is an easy protagonist to root for. The simplicity of Miralles' writing is also key; his short chapters are like brief, linked thoughts that highlight the magic in the ordinary (as Samuel wanders the city one night, the moon is described as "a giant, milk-colored fruit"). Although Samuel's revelations can be bluntly rendered--"I leapt out of bed, fired by the conviction that I was the master of my own fate," he muses one morning--it's in line with the earnest, genuine nature of a romance that involves meddlesome cats, fate, and lots of musings on Goethe, Kafka, and Rilke. A satisfyingly quaint romance.

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August 1, 2015

In this little fable, an international best seller available in 18 languages, a cat sneaks into the Barcelona apartment of forlorn linguistics professor Samuel and eventually leads him to his neighbors and his long-lost Gabriela. You've gotta love a book that's compared to Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project and Paolo Giordano's The Solitude of Prime Numbers.

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