A feel-good novel for fans of A Man Called Ove and   The Rosie Project, about an eccentric, language-loving bachelor and the cat that opens his eyes to life’s little pleasures The Silver Linings Playbook author Matthew Quick: “A delightfully absurd, life-affirming celebration. I literally stood up and cheered as I read the last page.” When Samuel, a lonely linguistics lecturer, wakes up on New Year’s Day, he is convinced that the year ahead will bring nothing more than passive verbs and un-italicized moments—until an unexpected visitor slips into his Barcelona apartment and refuses to leave. The appearance of Mishima, a stray, brindle-furred cat, becomes the catalyst that leads Samuel from the comforts of his favorite books, foreign films, and classical music to places he’s never been (next door) and to people he might never have met (a neighbor with whom he’s never exchanged a word). Even better, the Catalan cat leads him back to the mysterious Gabriela, whom he thought he’d lost long before, and shows him, in this international bestseller for fans of The Rosie Project, The Solitude of Prime Numbers,  and  A Man Called Ove, that sometimes love is hiding in the smallest characters. One of BuzzFeed’s “10 Books That Will Get You in the Mood on Valentine’s Day” “A delightfully absurd, life-affirming celebration. I literally stood up and cheered as I read the last page.” — Matthew Quick, New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook and Love May Fail “A charming and linguistically witty story about love, language, Barcelona, and cats (!) that will resonate for all of us who agree that life’s journey is one that we must never take alone. Funny and touching, Love in Lowercase is proof that the Butterfly Effect can work on a decidedly human scale. I’ve been asked to blurb a lot of books over the last dozen years or so, and few have I enjoyed as much as this one.” — Mark Dunn, bestselling author of Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters “If you don’t like cats, Mishima will change your worldview. If you do like cats, this book is a gift. Read it and fall in love!” — Gwen Cooper, New York Times bestselling author of Homer’s Odyssey “A lovely little book with nods to literature, philosophy and music that encourages us to wake up to our lives and to the people in them, and to let small coincidences lead us to love.” — BookPage “Genuinely charming . . . A romance that involves meddlesome cats, fate, and lots of musings on Goethe, Kafka, and Rilke . . . [It] highlight[s] the magic in the ordinary. . . . Samuel, full of awkwardness and good intentions, is an easy protagonist to root for.” — Kirkus Reviews “[This] endearing romantic comedy should become as big a hit Stateside as it has been elsewhere in the world.” — Publishers Weekly Francesc Miralles  is an award-winning author who has written a number of books, including, with Héctor García, the international bestseller Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life.  Born in Barcelona, he studied journalism, English literature, and German, and has worked as an editor, a translator, a ghost-writer, and a musician. Love in Lowercase has been translated into twenty languages. I Sea of Fog 650,000 Hours In no time at all the year was going to end and the new one was about to begin. Human inventions for selling calendars. After all, we’re the ones who’ve arbitrarily decided when the years, months, and even hours start. We shape the world in our own measure, and that soothes us. Under the apparent chaos, maybe there really is order in the universe. However, it certainly won’t be our order. I was putting a minibottle of cava and a dozen grapes on the table—one for each stroke of midnight, as is the custom in this country—and thinking about hours. I’d read somewhere that the battery of a human life runs down after 650,000 hours. Considering the medical history of the males in my family, I calculated that my best life expectancy in terms of hours was lower than the average: 600,000 at most. At thirty-seven, I could very well be halfway through. The question was, how many thousands of hours had I wasted so far? Until just before midnight on that 31st of December, my life hadn’t exactly been an adventure. The only member of my family was one sister I rarely saw. My existence alternated between the Department of German Studies and Linguistics, where I am an assistant lecturer, and my dreary apartment. Outside my literature classes, I had very little contact with other people. In my spare time, when I wasn’t preparing for classes and correcting exams, I did the typical things a boring bachelor does: read and reread books, listen to classical music, watch the news, and so on. It was a routine in which the biggest thrill was the odd trip to the supermarket. Sometimes, I gave myself a treat on weekends and went to the Verdi movie complex to see a foreign film. I came out as lonely as when I went in, but at least it was