"Meditation" is a word that often appears in book reviews, usually too loosely. But there's no other way to describe this book, which is nothing other than a meditation on death. A tense, fierce, involuted, relentless, brave meditation.Unfolding in the wake of a car accident that kills two brothers, the titular "Boys", this novel tells the story of a small-town tragedy in Catalonia through the eyes of four characters: A banker from a neighboring town, a cracked trucker, a young veterinary student who is engaged to one of the dead brothers, and an artist whose disturbing fixation with death will bring him to the brink. They face the accident, and the mortality it flings in their faces, in their own ways, and in the process their stories interlink.Sala's prose spirals, doubles back, feints, makes tactical retreats, but he is always gaining momentum. Actually, hurtling toward the abyss. The set-piece of this novel, a few pages where Sala explodes the boys' final moments—precisely, the final half-second, and all it contains before the victims' car slams into a tree—is terrifying, frantic, awe-inspiring prose. Mara Faye Lethem's translation here, and throughout, is a stunning accomplishment.