"We all have a home," said Philip Roth, "and that's always where things go wrong." In Los Caidos, a novel set in contemporary Cuba, we witness the collapse of a family whose members, without really knowing how, have ended up becoming adversaries who share the territory of the home.

The mother's illness, Mariana, of uncertain origin and unpredictable consequences, forces her to remain at home, alone with her memories of a time when the family held together in the face of the adversity of the "hard years." Mariana suffers epileptic seizures and is no longer the agglutinating element of the home. Diego, the youngest son, is about to end military service, fueling his resentment against the lie of his time, which is nothing other than the truth of the time of his father, Armando, who, in charge of a hotel Luxury for tourists, he must deal with his immovable socialist convictions, the small corrupts of his employees and the fact that his eldest daughter, Maria, has abandoned studies in search of decent living conditions and now works as a waitress in the same hotel . The anonymous calls that Mariana receives, in which a squeaky voice sings to the phone the painful truths of the family, only deteriorate her health and underline the chasm that opens between its members.

Composed of four voices with a naturalness only available to the great narrators, Carlos Manuel Álvarez's first novel faces without compromise the microcosm of a family that reveals itself as a metaphor for a society in which the promises were never fulfilled and the different truths They retract each other.