«With the ingredients of the classically formed novel and a volcanic and furious prose, Guillermo Aguirre drags us through the streets of a mythical Bilbao to narrate a story of violence and failure: the failure of an entire generation. One of the best Spanish novels I have read in recent years ».
Juan Gomez Barcena

The dog is to blame for everything, or at least that's what the twelve-year-old Crab believes, because it is by taking him for a walk that he meets Jotacé and his henchman Tarado, two free, insolent and violent kids who embody a universe that the Crab wants to form part of. part and that his middle-class family has denied him: the world of the street, with its fights and its myths. Immersed in a premature adolescence marked by the need for leadership and by the belief that it is legitimate to take what one craves by force, very soon the Crab finds himself dragged away from the classroom, exposed to his fate in a city ruled by boys and full of motorcycles, dealings and brawls, on which he also projects his personal mythology: gladiators in Roman amphitheatres, knights and princesses in medieval castles, legendary spies and gangsters. Thus, Crab grows between the real and the imaginary world, learning the codes of loyalty and the language of betrayal, and in his transition to the territory of adults it does not take him long to understand that these are even less reliable than the adolescents themselves.

A certain Crab narrates, in the manner of a picaresque novel, the course of an adolescence in Bilbao at the end of the nineties, showing the crudest aspects of a brutal masculinity that is nothing but a reflection of a macho society moved by violence, the sex and money An apprenticeship novel that flees from conventions, painfully funny and tense and hard as a hammer blow, in which Guillermo Aguirre portrays with scrapped lyric and machine gun epic a sentimental upbringing in mob law.