The Silence of Dust is Carlos Aguirre's debut novel, a short, powerful work that portrays the story of Rafa, a young man who, like many, grapples with the dilemma of embracing the challenge of premature adulthood or living life at a frenetic pace without fanfare, as long as life's circumstances compel him to indulge this impatience. The arrival of Rosa and an unexpected event lead him to repeat the very pattern he so vehemently criticized in his father: absence, escape, displacement—a journey by train toward a nowhere, a moment, an encounter with himself, his essence, or perhaps his absence.

The story of The Silence of Dust is Rafa's, but it could also be the story of all young people embarking on their own journeys of self-discovery, or of migrants seeking a life so they don't get lost.

With a refined and fluid prose, Carlos Aguirre introduces us to a diegesis that unfolds in a very planned and fortunate way among the echoes of the narrative of José Emilio Pacheco, Beatriz Espejo, Salvador Elizondo, J. J. Arreola or Amparo Dávila, in which each chapter of this novel emerges as a complete story that firmly weaves together this seemingly simple but solid tale of heartbreak, migration and the search for identity amidst a close-up of the socio-economic reality of hundreds of thousands of young Mexicans.