The Next Ones

Dying is inevitable. But what about those who remain?

The first day I had to wipe my father’s ass, I lied to myself saying it was the same as when I wiped my son’s.

With this devastatingly honest sentence, Pedro Simón opens the door to the most universal and silenced experience: how we face the decline and death of our elders.

After moving thousands of readers with The Ungrateful and The Misunderstood, Simón returns with his most difficult, most painful, and paradoxically, most necessary novel. Because nobody teaches us to hold up those who once held us up. Nobody prepares us for that moment when roles reverse and we must become the adults for those who were our parents.

This isn’t a novel about death, but about the lives of those who survive. About guilt, love mixed with exhaustion, tenderness coexisting with frustration. Simón, a master at exploring family relationships—that sourdough starter that feeds his stories—delivers his rawest and most real work, without concessions or easy comforts.

The Next Ones is a book that will leave you with a lump in your throat, but also with the certainty that you’re not alone in that pain. And that, in times when these things aren’t discussed, is the bravest thing literature can do.