Series

La Banda

The Carousel

An airport is run by companies that don’t employ each other, so the person in front of you never works for the one you’re complaining about. Four books, four people it happens to, and nobody is lying to any of them. Original fiction written in Latin American Spanish, running from A1 to A2.

About this series

An airport is run by companies that don’t employ each other. The person standing in front of you never works for the one you’re complaining about, and they know it before you do.

La Banda is four books inside one invented Mexican airport, told by four people who work there or are stuck there. A baggage handler whose badge opens the lost-property office and settles nothing. A man of sixty-three on his first flight, after forty years on the wrong side of counters like these. A shuttle driver who can cross the entire place and can’t help anyone in it. A gate agent who ends up on the aircraft with everybody else, told nothing by the airline she is the face of.

Nobody in these books is lying. The forms are real forms, the rules are the actual rules, and most of the people applying them would rather help than not. What the four of them run into is a building working exactly as designed, which turns out to be a different thing from a building that works.

Start with any of them. The four are written to be read in any order. A reader of one gets a whole story; a reader of four gets the same small cast from four sides, and a building they end up knowing better than the people who work in it.

Original fiction in Latin American Spanish for readers at A1 and above, written at the level rather than cut down to it — present tense throughout, closed episodes of a few pages each, and a glossary that carries everything outside the core.

Four books, in whatever order you like, set in the one place you are most likely to need Spanish first.

Spanish

Resguardo
La Banda, Level A1

Mexico

On her first morning in an airport's lost-property room, Yerin finds a closed box no one has claimed, full of loose papers and nothing else. Anything nobody claims by the last day of the month leaves in one lot, and nobody sees it again. Somewhere, somebody is missing that box, and Yerin has until the end of the month to find them.

Coming Oct 30

Free sample available
Spanish

Nos falta uno
La Banda, Level A1

Mexico

Forty years in this city and he has never once had a reason to come inside the airport, which is why he arrives two hours early for a flight that the screens, the counter and the woman at information each place at a different time. His granddaughter lands at two. By four he has worked out that she is somewhere in this airport and he is in the wrong building for her, and that the only person who moves between the two drives the shuttle.

In development — no release date yet
Spanish

La espera
La Banda, Level A2

Mexico

Ramiro has driven the shuttle between the terminals long enough to know this airport the way nobody who works inside one part of it ever will. Tonight the departures die one at a time, without an announcement, without anyone being told to go home, and by midnight his bus is as stuck as the people on it. He can get to every corner of this building, and there is nothing he’s allowed to tell the people in it.

In development — no release date yet
Spanish

Motivos operativos
La Banda, Level A2

Mexico

The two o’clock is delayed for operational reasons, which is the whole of what Altamar has told the waiting room and the whole of what it has told Marisol, who works the gate and is therefore, as far as any of them are concerned, the airline. She answers what she can. When the flight is finally called she walks out with all of them, and at the foot of the steps she knows exactly as much as they do.

In development — no release date yet