Labatut's first book of stories, La Antártica empieza aquí, won the Premio Caza de Letras 2009, awarded by UNAM and Alfaguara in Mexico.

His second book, Después de la luz, came out in 2016, followed by Un verdor terrible, which was published in English by Pushkin Press with the title When We Cease to Understand the World and nominated for the 2021 International Booker Prize.

In Después de la luz he narrates the ontological crisis of a subject facing the void in a world saturated with information and devoid of meaning.

"[citation needed] Ricardo Baixera, a literary critic for El Periódico, maintained that it was a "very strange fiction that from the first page questions the parameters of reality.

[2] Roberto Careaga, a journalist from El Mercurio, argued that the author follows "those scientists who captivated him, but it is not a collection of biographies: intense and variegated, it is a volume of stories strung along the brilliant paths of 20th-century science that ended in the unknown and sometimes in pure darkness.

[7] Ruth Franklin, writing in The New Yorker, argued that There is liberation in the vision of fiction’s capabilities that emerges here—the sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men.

It is centered on the life of von Neumann, though the first part of the book is about physicist Paul Ehrenfest, and the last one is about Lee Sedol's Go match against DeepMind's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo.