President's Room, the PB, Paperback

In a nameless suburb in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It's simply how things are, and no one seems to question it except for one young boy.

The room is kept clean and tidy, nobody talks about it and nobody is allowed to use it. It is for the president and no one else. But what if he doesn't come? And what if he does? As events unfold, the reader is kept in the dark about what's really going on. So much so, in fact, that we begin to wonder if even the narrator can be trusted . . .

Ricardo Romero has been compared to Kafka and Italo Calvino, and we see why in this eerie, meditative novel narrated by a shy young boy who seems to be very good at lying about the truth. Following in the footsteps of Julio Cort zar and a certain literary tradition of sinister rooms (such as Dr Jekyll's laboratory), The President's Room is a mysterious tale based on the suspicion that a house is never just one single home.

• Selected by the Culture Trip for its list of best jacket covers for 2017

Ricardo Romero was born in the province of Entre Ríos, in northern Argentina, in 1976. He studied Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and has been living in Buenos Aires since 2002. Between 2003 and 2006 he directed the literary journal Oliverio and between 2006 and 2010 he was one of the members of the 'El Quinteto de la Muerte' (The Lethal Quintet) with which he published two books: 5 and La fiesta de la narrativa (Fiction's Party). He has also published a book of short stories, Tantas noches como sean necesarias (As Many Nights as may be Necessary, 2006) and the novels Ninguna parte (Nowhere, 2003), El síndrome de Rasputín (Rasputin's Syndrome, 2008), Los bailarines del fin del mundo (The Dancers of the End of the World, 2009), Perros de la lluvia (Rain Dogs, 2011), El spleen de los muertos (The Spleen of the Dead, 2013) and Historia de Roque Rey (The Tale of Roque Rey, 2014). The President's Room (2015) is his latest novel.