Home Reading Service (Other Press Paperback Original) by Mexican-Italian author Fabio Morábito is a love letter to art, exploring the power of books to create a community or even transform a life. A slim novel with tremendous depth, it's perfect for fans of the dry observational humor of Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here, and of curmudgeonly characters that ultimately charm, like in Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove and the movie Up. Told from the perspective of Eduardo, a man who’s spent most of his time on Earth simply allowing things to happen to him, Home Reading Service presents universal truths about our need for connection, and the fragile nature of relationships.
Nearing thirty-five, Eduardo desires nothing in particular. He lives in the once-upscale Mexican town of Cuernavaca, where the mafia routinely extorts the local businesses, like his family’s, for monthly ‘protection’ payments. At his required community service of reading to the elderly and disabled, he doesn’t listen to a word of the Dostoyevsky or Henry James that he reads. But when Eduardo comes across a poem his father, now slowly dying of cancer, had once copied by the Mexican poet Isabel Fraire, it affects him as no literature has before. In sharing the poem, he’s astonished at what those few words are capable of bringing out in others.
