El hotel de los corazones rotos

Mexico City, early 1999. At twenty-one, Bruno Bolado has yet to finish his open-enrollment high school program; he spends his days in an alcohol-fueled void, fantasizing about writing a radio serial titled *The Hotel of Broken Hearts*. Then, one day, he spots what looks like an Elvis Presley mascot costume hanging inside a minibus and decides to follow its trail—unaware of the rabbit hole leading into a murky underworld that he is about to enter. Guided by a character named "El Agallas" (Guts), he is drawn into a web of delirium, paranoia, and revenge—a situation from which Bruno will never quite figure out how he entered or where the exit lies. Shortly thereafter, his world is turned even further upside down when he falls for Milena, an enigmatic English Literature student at UNAM who is writing her thesis on Sylvia Plath. When the student strike breaks out, their parallel lives drift even further apart: while Milena takes part in the fight for free public education, Bruno cannot bring himself to confess his secret identity—or the work he does helping friends in a fake ambulance that roams the city looking for injured people to transport to the hospital.