The Crossed Out Notebook

''This stylish debut novel by an Oscar-winning Argentine screenwriter (he co-wrote Birdman) is a suspenseful, darkly funny exploration of the creative process and the porous boundary between reality and fiction. Highly recommended'' The Mail on Sunday, ''The Best New Fiction''

From the Academy Award-winning co-writer of Birdman, a wonderfully eccentric, suspenseful debut in the tradition of Misery and Kiss of the Spiderwoman about a screenwriter kidnapped by a world-famous director who orders him to compose a masterpiece.

Pablo, a failed Argentine novelist-turned-screenwriter, has been kidnapped by the greatest Latin American film director of all time and is kept in a basement where he works, day after day, on what he is told must at all costs be a great, world-changing screenplay. Every night, after finishing work on the script, Pablo writes in his notebook and every morning he crosses out what he wrote the night before. The Crossed-Out Notebook is Pablo''s diary of this time: being brought food by a maid; being threatened with a gun; vociferously arguing with the director about what he''s written the previous day.

The clash between the two men and their different approaches leads to a movie being made, a gun going off, an unlikely escape, and a final confrontation. In the end, The Crossed-Out Notebook is a darkly funny novel full of intrigue and surprise about the essence of the creative process; a short, crazy ode to any artist whose brilliance shines through strangeness and adversity.