THE ANTHROPOLOGIST

What are we humans not willing to lose? In a world ruled by a machine, a woman plants the seed of revolt.

A small redoubt of humans has survived the collapse and lives in a society ordered by the implacable logic of artificial intelligence. Everything works: people are born, the system raises them, gives them a job and, at forty, as the calculations dictate, it strikes them down. There is, however, one unsolvable
problem: they are sad.
Sílvia is an anthropologist and tries to find a cure for the plague of sadness by observing the society before the catastrophe,that is, us. Delving into the recreation of an extinct family, she learns new words such as doubt, longing, pity, hatred, love and faith. She is a little lost: she does not understand why fathers,mothers, sons and daughters used to share a house united by an anomaly they called feelings. Nor why her objects of study do not fall into sadness. The restlessness that the discovery generates pushes her to a broader search and to transgress the system to try to recover everything that makes us human.
Ada Castells has written a splendid novel that condenses the lights and darkness of current times and projects them into a future that refuses to be dystopian. With sober and direct prose, a well-knit plot and such convincing characters that they invite us to read with avidity, The Anthropologist, poignant and hopeful, explores the limits of technology, freedom versus security, the dangers of individualism, reason versus spirituality.
And motherhood. A journey to our certainties, a universal reflection on who we are and what we want to be. And on what we are not willing to lose.

“The most profound and imaginative book by Ada Castells. A novel with many layers,and with a magnificent ending.”
Núria Perpinyà

“Ada Castells’ prose has the urgent talent of someone who writes in danger to save the world.”
Carlos Zanón