«Juan Gómez Bárcena claims for literature an intermediate point between imagination and hypothesis, culture and life. A writer who is new and, at the same time, like the usual ones, and who occupies a privileged place in the Spanish narrative panorama».
Martha Sanz

The conquest of Mexico is over, and Juan de Toñanes is one of many inglorious soldiers who wander like beggars through the land they helped subdue. When he receives one last mission, to hunt down a renegade Indian who is nicknamed the Father and who preaches a dangerous heresy, he realizes that it may be his last chance to carve out the future he always dreamed of. But as he journeys into the uncharted lands of the north following the Father's trail, he will discover the footsteps of a man who seems not just a man, but a prophet destined to transform his time and even the times to come.

Not even the dead is the story of a persecution that transcends territories and centuries; a path that heads north, always north, that is, always towards the future, on a hallucinated journey from the New Spain of the 16th century to the Trump wall of today. Through it pass ancient conquerors on horseback and migrants who ride the roofs of the Beast, insurgent Indians and peasants who patiently await a better world, Mexican revolutionaries who take their rifles and women murdered in the desert of Ciudad Juárez. All of them share the same landscape and the same hope: the arrival of the Father who will bring justice to the oppressed.

In his new novel, Gómez Bárcena takes the Mexican reality as a pretext to look into universal history, in a critical reading that questions faith in progress and highlights the unfulfilled promises of capitalism. With echoes of authors as disparate as Joseph Conrad, Alejo Carpentier or David Mitchell, Not even the dead is the journey of two homeless men who move forward because they can no longer go back, and it is also a vindication of justice for the losers of history.