The title

Someone has asked me what the title means, and why I chose it. I originally thought of the title in Spanish - Si se cae. This is a bit difficult to explain - in Spanish, if someone drops something, you don't say 'I dropped it' you say 'it fell'. In other words, it is not your fault, stuff just happens. This is kind of the feeling I wanted for Raphael - it's not his fault, things just happen to him, and that could be said of Guatemala in general, though of course the roots of the civil war can be traced to a particular fault.

So that was how I ended up with the English version, If It Falls. I'm not especially good at thinking up titles, and I wasn't sure this title was right, but most of the people who read drafts of the novel said they liked it, so it stuck!