Dust and Tenderness

By Denis Matas

A meeting. A park bench. A story about love that doesn't save, but matters nonetheless.
Marcos lives an empty life: a job he hates, identical days, lonely nights. When he hears a rumor about the Lilos Park, he goes out of curiosity, looking for something to break the monotony. What he finds is Laura: a woman reading old books on a park bench, speaking of fallen empires with the passion of someone who still remembers what she once was before she was lost.

She is intelligent, ironic, broken. He is lonely, lost, desperate to connect with someone. Between afternoons of ancient history, shared cigarettes, and comfortable silences, something is born that neither of them expected: a fragile and genuine connection in the midst of a world that doesn't forgive.

But Laura carries demons that Marcos cannot fight. Her addiction, her past, her certainty that everything she touches is destroyed. And although he tries to hold her up, although he loves her with an intensity that frightens him, he soon discovers that love isn't always enough to save someone who doesn't want to be saved.

It's a novel about urban loneliness, about encounters that transform us even if they don't last, about the beauty that can be found in ruins. It's a harsh, honest, and profoundly human story about two broken people who meet in the wrong place at the wrong time and decide to share their pain for the brief time that fate grants them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0G4TM117S
• ISBN13: 9798277074091
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"