The Key Biscayne Affair: A Novel by Xita Rubert, Julia Sanches (Hardcover) (PREORDER)

Fiction - Contemporary - Coming of Age - Family Life - Marriage & Divorce - Humorous - Dark Humor

RELEASE DATE: 11/10/2026 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE)

Translated from the Spanish by: Julia Sanches

Winner of the Herralde Novel Prize

A darkly funny coming-of-age novel where Florida’s sun-drenched strangeness meets the dangers of derelict parenting and misplaced devotion

An eccentric Spanish philosophy professor relocates with his two children, a boy and a girl, from Boston to a gated island off the coast of Miami. The kids have come to the US to learn English and spend time with their father after a heated custody battle. But as the professor is embraced by a glittering social scene and his seemingly fun, innocent antics tip into recklessness, the children receive a very different kind of education.

In this lush, sharply observed novel, an unnamed, unreliable narrator remembers her surreal stay on Key Biscayne, where nobody lives unless they have something to hide. As the narrator is gradually drawn into the island’s morally ambiguous world, putting her innocence at risk, she begins to overidentify with her father. She becomes not just witness but also accomplice to his erratic behavior, acquiescing to his efforts to isolate herself and her brother from their concerned mother, whose calls from Spain go unanswered.

The Key Biscayne Affair is a tender, disorienting, and deeply disquieting coming-of-age story disguised as a psychological thriller. Xita Rubert delivers a powerful meditation on childhood and the knotty truths that memory leaves behind.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Xita Rubert is a Spanish novelist. In 2024, she won the Herralde Novel Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes for the novel in the Spanish language, for The Key Biscayne Affair. Her first novel, My Days with the Kopp Family, was translated into several languages. She is based in New York and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University.

TRANSLATOR BIO: 

Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Recent translations include Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024, Boulder by Eva Baltasar, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023, and Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver, for which she won the 2022 PEN translation prize. Born in Brazil, she currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Review Quotes:

"A brilliantly demented story of girlhood, Florida, and the unhinged sexuality of the early aughts. Xita Rubert's sentences sparkle." - Catherine Lacey, national bestselling author of Biography of X

"Xita Rubert's young legend precedes her: she is among Spain's most talented novelists, and her first book in English is a sly and dangerous gift." - Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winner The Netanyahus

"Xita Rubert's voice is incandescent. The story she tells, disquieting. Her intelligence, savage. The Key Biscayne Affair reads with thrilling intensity, and then stays with you as what it is: a great work of literature." - Álvaro Enrigue, author of You Dreamed of Empires

"The Key Biscayne Affair is an intense, entertaining, provocative book with a brilliant concentric setup: a fragile family, isolated unto itself, on an island, far from any kind of safe territory, and at its heart the sharp, witty daughter. Xita Rubert is an amazing writer." - --Aleksandar Hemon, author of The World and All That It Holds

"Extraordinary. Nabokov would fall from his chair upon reading this novel." - Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Mac's Problem