How would you live the last year of your life if you knew the exact date of your death? Especially, if you were relatively young, healthy, and such omen made no sense. This is the question Sebastián asks himself every day after receiving a mysterious note that reads, “You have one year to live.” This deadly warning finds Dr. Sebastián Luis Pérez-Fuertes as a lonely and burned out physician who is, without a doubt, at the lowest point in his life.

Decades prior, in Korea (1950), a young sergeant named Samuel Pérez finds himself more than 7000 nmi away from his beloved Puerto Rico. His regiment, the 65th Infantry of the U.S. Army, has been explanted from the Caribbean and is now battling a deadly North Korean enemy. Back home, Samuel’s sweetheart, Dolores Fuertes, was fighting her own war against a monumental psychiatric metamorphosis ignited by the sudden deployment of her soulmate, the death of her father and her mother’s rampant alcoholism. Unbeknownst to either of them, the invisible scars inflicted by these years would one day forge the unhappiness of their family.

Back in present times and throughout the next year, Sebastián struggles with the daily receipt of these mysterious missives that remind him of the day in which he will supposedly die. Around this time, he meets Violeta, a newfound love that ignites his passion for life and medicine. Ultimately, the incessant delivery of these unpleasant reminders unleashes a literary hurricane filled with enigma, opened wounds from the Korean War, Medicine and Hispanic American culture, while navigating the confines of Puerto Rico, bathed in a sea of magical realism. In Catharsis, the narrator extends an invisible contract that welcomes the reader into a unique, unhappy family, scarred by its past, and a man whose only desire is to continue existing despite a future overshadowed by a distressing premonition.