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      • Fiction
        June 2022

        Uprooted

        by Julia Rendon Abrahamson

        With brilliant prose, Julia Rendón Abrahamson portrays the life of a separated mother in New York. A young Ecuadorian woman has a daughter with a Catalan banker and in the midst of today's broken society seeks a way to redeem the family's emigration dating back to World War II from Nazi-occupied Vienna.   A powerful repertoire of uncontrollable images of family memory leap into the consciousness of the day to day of a New York life marked by lovelessness, parenting, the search for a new life. Thought attempts to spin a discourse that functions as a protective blanket as a vital youthful impulse dominates her sexual, amorous and familial experiences.   This is the novel debut of an original writer who creates a dazzling text for the power of the language, which emerges as if it springs from the deep need to name the world.   In this great moment of visibility of Ecuadorian women's writing, Julia Rendón Abrahamson comes to tell us that the themes that interest the region are not exhausted in violence, or what may seem exotic abroad. She claims that what does exist in this territory is a diversity of identities and experiences that need to be read.

      • Fiction

        La Forastera

        by Olga Merino

        A contemporary western set in the rugged, unforgiving territory ofrural Spain. A thrilling story about human resilience. For the locals, Angie is the village crazy lady. She lives isolated and alone in the country, surrounded by ghosts who torment her with childhood memories of a poor working-class neighbourhood in Barcelona and a passionate love affair in her youth with an artist from London. One morning, Angie discovers the lifeless body of the local landowner hanging from the branch of a walnut tree. This news endangers her own land and the future of the entire village. In her struggle to keep what’s hers, Angie uncovers a series of secrets deeply buried in that land. This leads to a liberating realisation: once you lose everything, they can’t take anything away from you. And then you’re invincible.

      • Literary Fiction
        April 2018

        Cervantes for goats, Marx for sheep

        by Pablo Santiago Chiquero

        Mateo works as a herdsman of goats and sheep in Abra, a remote village in the province of Córdoba. He is smart and inquisitive, and due to the lack of incentives in his life he suffers from a severe depression. Only Lázaro Esquivel, a newcomer teacher, is able to get him out of his lethargy using an unorthodox therapy, at the same time that the II Republic of Spain is proclaimed. Once recovered, the first goal of the herdsman will be winning back Conchita, his ex-girlfriend. His second goal will be encouraging reading to get the village of Abra out of its ancient lack of culture. He will try to achieve this with a false veterinary experiment between goats and sheep that will put the whole village to read Cervantes’ Quixote and Marx’s Capital. The novel, set in the rural Andalusia at the beginnings of the 30s, suggests the possibility of a total metamorphosis of society through knowledge and the change of moral values as consequence. More than a rural comedy, Cervantes is for goats, Marx is for sheep is a fable about the love of books, the faith in classic authors and the transformative power of reading.

      • Fiction
        March 2020

        small red women

        by Marta Sanz

        A novel about the dead and the disappeared, for whom the search still endures, and against a far-right that has never left and turned into a universal threat. A noir novel that prolongs the possibility of the political novel. Paula Quiñones arrives in Azafrán as a volunteer to help locate civil war mass graves. Little by little, she integrates herself into the community and gets to know its power dynamics, governed by a family whose patriarch has just turned one hundred years old. The story becomes obscured, and the village becomes a threatening space in which Paula’s discoveries begin to put her in danger. Who were the dead that Paula is looking for? Who do the voices, that chase her like a tragic chorus of kids and women, belong to? A novel about economic and cultural violence, and about violence against women, that dissects accounts of memory. «Sanz has few possible competitors in her generation. If someone is called to remain in posterity, it’s her (…) She has talent, brightness, and nerve. It's literature in its pure state (…) With each narration that carries her signature, the miracle of good literature is produced» (Ángeles López, La Razón). «small red women—like so, in lowercase—is a subversive game that becomes a homage. The story of Paula, a middle aged inspector who arrives in the imagined location of Azafrán to work on a project of historical memory (…) The far-right’s boom in Spain and around the world has given this story an unexpected urgency. Or maybe not so unexpected (…) The novel takes from many genres and at the same time transcends them, manipulates them. But, like the previous two parts of the trilogy, it bathes in the noir and plays with it» (Juan Carlos Galindo, El País).

      • Literary Fiction
        May 2021

        Outside of time

        by Silvia Bardelás

        "Destiempo is a song to the fight for internal revolutions and the desire to free ourselves from the vital ropes that bind us." - Armando Requeixo. Diario cultural. Radio Galega   Destiempo illuminates the we as the truly human space. An older woman asks her grandson to come back to Galicia from the United States to spend the summer with her. She wants him to attend a kind of social fight that she is carrying out with her friends. They look for action as the only thing that can give meaning to their lives. Silvia Bardelás mixes different generations that share the same problem: the weight of a standardized world, full of discourses, oblivious to vitality. The possibility of feeling alive and real again makes everything move in an unstoppable way. The story is a coming and going of past and present, of ideas and actions that reveal the silent social power and the inner need to feel free. Destiempo (Outside of time) is a community novel. Beyond individuality, beyond the group is the we, which can only emerge genuinely when individuals become singular beings, when they become aware of the myths, the ideology, the discourses that have dominated their lives and those of their ancestors.   The narrator puts the focus on the interrelation. He lights up scenes where the characters discover themselves through others.

      • Fiction
        March 2019

        And they say

        by Susana Sánchez Aríns

        Dicen (And they say) is a family story crossed by Franco's repression.   It tells what is not registered in notarial acts, or in newspapers, or in books, or in provincial archives. It tells a story of a day-to-day silence that became long, very long, and that has conditioned us until now.   Dicen tells real events in a network of voices silenced for generations, it is not written from the political reflection, but from the poetic justice, it is the contemporary account of the Spanish postwar period.   Dicen is an innovative book. It is not poetry, it is not an essay, it is not a short narrative and it is everything at the same time. Written in short sequences, it collects the intimate memory of a family and reconstructs their insignificant lives to show the terror of repression after the civil war. Conversations, poems, stories, essay references, fragmented sequences that the reader orders in a shocking story.   The narration drags the reader to the end by the rhythm, the different voices, the authenticity and the gradual understanding of why that time is silenced.   The author speaks of poetic justice as a way of giving life to those who did not want to be named after their death: the oppressors. This story recovers their names, their ways of acting, their personalities, their power. And it also brings back to life those who died in the ditches or lived marginalized: the victims.   It is very difficult to make historical memory from politics, however, literature is its natural space. An original work, with enormous expressive force and a unique point of view discovered by Susana Sánchez Aríns, an experienced, committed voice.   The book has received the Madrid Booksellers Award for Best Fiction Book 2019. (Premio de los Libreros de Madrid al Mejor Libro de Ficción)

      • Fiction
        February 2022

        Obra Maestra (Masterpiece)

        by Juan Tallon

        The story in this novel is utterly implausible – and yet it happened. One of the world’s leading museums, the Reina Sofía in Madrid, commissioned a piece from leading American sculptor Richard Serra to celebrate its inauguration in 1986. A sculpture weighing thirty-eight tons which one fine day… simply vanished into thin air. Nobody knew how it had disappeared, when it had happened, or who was responsible. A mixture of nonfiction novel and fictionalized reportage, combining the bizarre with the hallucinogenic, Masterpiece employs the pace of a thriller to reconstruct a case that poses some disturbing questions. How could something like this have happened? How does a copy become an original? What even is contemporary art? And what was the true fate of the famous, huge and immensely heavy steel sculpture that evaporated? Might it reappear one day?   “I am especially amazed by the generosity of this polyphony. More than a stylisticaudacity, I see it as proof of great sensitivity. The author speaks masterfully of contemporaryart, addressing the relationship between the original and the copy and the collective dimension of a work. It also inspires a keen awareness of history. Even more impressive, it offers a scathing vision of our present, and more particularly our political present. It is admirable to have succeeded in turning a work as rectangular as Equal-Parallel / Guernica-Bengasi into a prism that refracts the world so powerfully”.Benjamin Burguete, editor at Le Bruit du Monde (France)

      • Fiction
        September 2021

        Mia Fantasia. Quina amiga més estranya! | What a Strange Friend!

        by Elisenda Roca

        Keep 7-year-old spell-loving readers interested in books with Mía… and her non-stop talking pet friends! Mía Fantasía series is about friendship, family, girl-power, love for animals and living together. Based on the framework of fantasy, adventure and mystery genres, the stories are full of humour and positive thinking. Chapters are kept small to read one or two a night and the story is easy to follow even for younger kids. Readers will enjoy the full colour, expressive and charming illustrations by Betowers that accompany the entertaining stories of Mía, the little witch. In the first issue, Fantasía family life is about to change with the arrival of the new neighbours. The Square House family moves in across the dirt road. Robert and Dora’s house is very modern, minimal and functional. They love to keep their life organized, in order, without unpredictable twists and turns. And so does their daughter Lía until she meets Mía. When Lía enters Mía’s world, she finds out the true magic of colours and happiness and discovers that magic does exist. Who would have said that Mía’s super-confident, daring and adventurous character would pair perfectly with Lia’s logical, fearful one. From then onwards, they become best friends! Click to sing Mía's song!

      • Fiction

        FRANKENSTEIN'S MOTHER

        by ALMUDENA GRANDES

        An improbable love story that becomes an unforgettable tale of redemption, by the author awarded the 2018 National Prize for Narrative that has sold over 130.000 copies in Spain alone In 1954, the young psychiatrist Germán Velázquez arrives at the Ciempozuelos asylum for women in the south of Madrid. He escaped from the Civil War with his father’s help and took shelter with the Goldstein family in Switzerland, where he studied. In the asylum, Germán will meet a patient, the extraordinary Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira, a highly cultured schizophrenic parricide, and her assistant, María, a modest young woman whom she has educated and taught to read. Attracted by María, Germán grows disturbed when she avoids him and refuses to see him alone, and he suspects that she harbors many secrets she can only speak about outside the hospital’s walls. Maria’s humble origins as the granddaughter of the gardener, her years as maid to a powerful family in Madrid, her disenchantment with her first lover, her relationship with Aurora and the nuns, will become clear to readers as they learn in parallel of Germán’s life in Switzerland, where he witnessed the devastation suffered by a Jewish family amid the ravages of the Second World War. Soulmates yearning to flee their respective pasts, Germán and María want a new opportunity. Unfortunately, they come to see they are living in a country on its knees, where every sin is a crime and puritanism and repression provide cover for abuses and vileness of all kinds.

      • Fiction
        July 2020

        La playa y el tiempo

        by Ernesto Calabuig

        "Writing is daring, like taking your clothes off on a beach”. This is the start to the first of the short stories that make up this book, the story of a writer who, at the age of forty-seven, decides to stop the inertia and decline of her life and not come back from her summer holiday. The main character of Beijing-Xàtiva, on board of a train, will also find out the almost unfathomable implications of trying to bring the past back. Through this collection we see a whole gallery of diverse characters that share the common denominator of a fight against the frantic pace of time: school teachers, flamenco dancers, old sea men, Japanese engineers, fathers that watch their children grow and drift away, impossible lovers from an old translation academy, high school lovers who lost track of each other, men visited by Greek philosophers and tormented by a dream, French guitarists, voyeurs of other people’s lives… Even Leonard Cohen portrayed in detail during his years in a Buddhist monastery, in silence, away from the stage. “Escribir es un atrevimiento, como quedarse desnuda en una playa”. Así comienza el primero de los relatos que componen este libro, la historia de una escritora que, a sus cuarenta y siete años, decide detener la inercia y el declive de su vida y no regresar de un veraneo. También el protagonista de Pekín-Xàtiva, a bordo de un tren, descubrirá las implicaciones casi fantasmales de intentar recuperar el pasado. Por esta colección desfila toda una galería de variados personajes que comparten el denominador común de afrontar el vértigo del paso del tiempo: maestras infantiles, bailaoras de flamenco, ancianos del mar del Norte, ingenieros japoneses, padres que ven a sus hijos crecer y alejarse, amantes imposibles de una vieja academia de traducciones, amores de instituto a los que se les perdió la pista, hombres visitados por filósofos griegos y atormentados por un sueño, guitarristas franceses, voyeurs de las vidas ajenas… Y hasta el propio Leonard Cohen retratado al detalle en sus años de silencio, apartado de los escenarios en un monasterio budista."

      • Fiction

        Fin de temporada

        by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón

        A road along the Portuguese border, June 1977. Juan and Rosa, little more than adolescents, have an appointment in a clandestine abortion clinic, but an accident keeps them from reaching their destination. Almost twenty years later, Rosa and her son Iván begin what will be their life’s project, the restoration of a campground on the Costa Dorada on the other end of the peninsula. Since Iván was born, they have lived in different places, always tentatively, always alone, fleeing from a past that will soon catch up with them. Season's End is a novel about the sometimes venomous strength of blood ties, about family secrets that condemn every generation to repeat the same errors, and about how knowledge transforms us into other people. Ignacio Martínez de Pisón creates memorable characters here in an extraordinary tale of mother and son that extends across nearly a quarter of a century, revealing to us how things unresolved in the past can trap us despite, or even because of, our attempts to ignore them.

      • Fiction
        February 2020

        Sea of stars

        by Laia Aguilar

        Winner of the 2020 Josep Pla Prize.  A group of friends. A house in front of the sea. A sea of stars and an unresolved past.  A group of friends meet five years after a tragic accident in a house in Cap de Creus, an idyllic seaside enclave, with the excuse of seeing a sea of stars.They enjoy the reunion and share secrets, but jealousies also flourish, and an old love story and still-smoldering sentiments unearth an issue from the past that remains unresolved.None of them can imagine how the night will end. A night that has one more surprise in store.“She couldn’t say if it was because Nis had asked her or because she had let herself be dragged along. But she had come. It was two weeks ago. With two suitcases and an uncertain future, following the steps of the man who had seduced her. ‘We’ll be happy there, Olivia, we’ll be good. Trust me,’ Nis had repeated into her ear.”

      • Fiction
        November 2019

        Consciousness

        by Teresa Colom

        Blade runner, I, Robot, 2001... Science fiction has often looked at the question of what would happen if machines became human. But what would happen if the mind of a human was transplanted into a machine?In a world where humanity has had to reorganize to survive after an ecological catastrophe, it is now possible to buy immortality: all you have to do is upload the consciousness of a dead person to a computer system. Laura Verns, terminally ill, decides to purchase one of these “extended lives” before dying.Twenty years later, after her body has died, Laura’s virtual life is threatened, and she will have to look deep into her memories to see what it is that’s threatening her.

      • Fiction
        March 2022

        Oceanic

        by Yolanda González

        A right whale is beached on the Basque coastline on the eve of the G7 Summit held in Biarritz in August of 2019. An environmental journalist is knocked down by the whale’s final fin thrash while she is covering the news story. The event is politically suspicious because various clues point to a sabotage operation orchestrated by anti-system groups gathered in Hendaya to protest the summit. The whale’s cadaver becomes the awkward guest at political meeting, adding tension to an already fraught social situation marked by the crisis and the continuing protested by the Yellow Vests.   In parallel, in the Spain of King Philip II, a group of Basque whalers prepare for the great transatlantic expedition in search of whale oil, the essential fuel for the development of the civilized world. Men die at sea and women confront the human drama with their own weapons while the city of Bayonne is decorated for the celebration of the meeting between the two great European monarchies.     The very same ocean that served as the hatchery for budding empires, today is agonizing in full view of the Group of Seven. The gazes of Elizabeth of Valois, Catherine de Medici, and their courts blend into the gazes of Macron, Trump, and the other world leaders. Outside, the streets are filled with screaming protestors. The whales advance toward them, special guests to the powerful party. Five centuries separate the two great political meetings: the Biarritz G7 Summit focused on inequality and climate change, and the 1565 Bayonne meeting for peace between the peoples of the Spanish and French crowns.   Using elements from the ecothriller, historical fic3on, and poli3cal sa3re, the novel Oceanic blends different 3me periods and narra3ve voices, making nature a leading character.

      • Literary Fiction
        March 2020

        Exorcisms

        by Juan Francisco Ferré

        The exorcism is a writing technique that can be used to free the energy of demons inhabiting our reality and mind, and then pass them to some other body. These tales invoke those intrusive and obsessive presences using words and fiction. They are tales about bits and pieces, told out loud and softly, with fine and thick traces, with the cry full of rage of a possessed man or a prisoner, and with the intimate whispering of naked lovers in the darkness of their bedroom. They talk about history, but not only. About desire and sex, about craziness and stupidity, about the body and its powers, traumas and sorrows, about love and eroticism, about animals and time, about loneliness and beauty, about the past and the present, about women and men and children, about the brain and its marvelous fantasy, about youth and the end of dreams, about power and politics and the corruption of power and politics, but not only. They are the exorcisms of strange voices and imaginary lives that the author has lived so intensely as he has lived his own.

      • Fiction
        May 2019

        When I Sing The Mountain Dances

        by Irene Solà

        EUROPEAN UNION PRIZE FOR LITERATURE A novel of the mountain in which humans, the animal kingdom, and the vegetal kingdom take the floor to tell an incredibly beautiful story of love, friendship, and redemption. Domènec, a peasant and a poet, and Sió, his wife and a beautiful and determined girl, move to Matavaques, his country house in the mountains close to the border with France. During one of their usual walks, Domènec dies hit by lightning during a storm. Sió must carry on running the farm and with the education of their children Mia and Hilari, who are still very young. The local legends and the landscape of the Pyrenees shape the imagination and sensibility of these children who have a wonderful friendship with a neighbor their age: the strong and mysterious Jaume. He and Mia enter into a relationship. When they are just 20, Hilari and Jaume go hunting and Jaume accidentally kills Hilari. He never returns to the village when he gets out of prison. Time passes, Mia is a shy woman who lives only with the company of her dog Lluna. One night when he’s had too much to drink at the bar where he works as a cook, Jaume runs over a deer with his car. When he realizes that the animal is still alive, he feels the impulse to go back to Matavaques to finally talk to Mia. With an overflowing and contagious energy, Solà has written a tight novel with beautiful prose full of textures and a daring game of points of view. «Solà's prose seduces us with her exultant ability to write about memory, knowledge, and life in a world of its own with enthusiasm and joy» (Ponç Puigdevall, El País).

      • Fiction
        September 2020

        A Love

        by Sara Mesa

        Ambitious, solid, risky: a novel about solitude and exclusion that is disturbing like Highsmith and sexual like Lawrence. Nat, a young and inexperienced translator, has just moved to the small rural nucleus La Escapa. Her landlord will soon show his true colors and the conflicts surrounding the dilapidated rented house will become a real obsession for her. The rest of the area’s inhabitants will receive Nat with apparent normalcy, while deep down lie incomprehension and mutual strangeness. La Escapa will go on to acquire its own personality, oppressing and confusing, which will make Nat face not only her neighbors, but her own self and failures. Filled with silences and missteps, prejudices and implicit meanings, taboos and transgressions, Un amor confronts readers with the limits of their own morality in a novel in which, as though it were a Greek tragedy, the most unsuspected desires of its protagonists emerge while the community constructs a scapegoat. «What is fascinating about Sara Mesa is her ability to map the human condition through losers, the abuse of power, oppressive and isolated places, the slow and continuous degradation. That’s why her novels are so interesting: because they are always rough, bitter, sincere, dark, unpleasant and slow» (Ángeles López, La Razón).

      • Fiction
        January 2020

        The Heart of the Party

        by Gonzalo Torné

        An incisive, daring, vibrant, and shameless novel about community and class, the nation and money. After inheriting an enormous flat in the center of Barcelona, Clara Montsalvatges decides to transform it into a space where she can take care of friends who are going through a rough patch. But everything changes when a mysterious neighboring couple begins to shout and fight. Partly out of fear and partly as a game, Clara invites her ex-boyfriend to help her “resolve” the situation while they decide what to do with one another. After a night of yelling and fighting, Clara breaks into the flat across the hall and becomes a confidante for her neighbor Violeta Mancebo—the King of Cataluña’s daughter-in-law, who narrates a story in which her modest origins contrast with those of a wealthy, corrupt social class that holds power. A novel about money and class that melds with the best within the tradition of literature made in Barcelona. «It has something in common with novelists like Juan Marsé, Eduardo Mendoza, and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán» (José Antonio Montano, The Objective). «Torné can be perfectly placed alongside Philip Roth and Karl Ove Knausgård: he is a master of tone» (Tanya Sweeney, Independent).

      • Fiction
        January 2019

        Sánchez

        by Esther García Llovet

        A brilliant portrait of the Madrid you won’t find in tourist guides. A thriller with imagery and situations worthy of a David Lynch in a state of grace. A night in the outskirts of Madrid—gambling and bingo, gas stations and bars in the middle of nowhere. A starkly real Madrid in which suddenly the unexpected, even the magical, can happen. This is the backdrop for the characters of this novel, losers in search of an opportunity. Their names are Nikki and Sánchez. They’ve shared a life together in the past, but now they are separated. She has been dealing tobacco in the South and now has come back to Madrid where she has entered the world of gambling and greyhound races. He is famous for being jinxed and inclined to disappear. Nikki asks Sánchez to help her to deliver a greyhound named Cromwell to an Italian woman who is in the racing business. Over the course of an endless night, the couple will make its way through a spectral Madrid as they search for this greyhound and meet a cast of odd characters, such as the Serbian artist who has just put on a performance that consists of eating raw meat in the middle of a forest for 24 hours… «Esther García Llovet is a rara avis… The author questions every code, every image, every word… Wonderful» (Marta Sanz).

      • Fiction
        April 2021

        Hosts

        by Julio Botella

        A book delves into the psychology of victims of child abuse and bullying, in their childhood and in the development of their personality in the future.   A host (un huésped) is also a plant or animal in whose body a parasite is housed. Julio Botella brings this idea to the plane of family psychology. In a family, what is not spoken about, not understood, born from some dark circumstance, creates a broken personality that unconsciously ends up staying in a new member. That is the invisible family heritage that these stories show.   Huéspedes (Hosts) is a book of stories that subtly intersect. The characters go through them coiled in their personality, unaware that they are hosts and transmitters.   The narrator is a conscious voice of this heritage and his writing becomes a kind of exorcism. He takes the reader deep into the characters through very powerful scenes where they face their fears. A father who transfers his frustration to an insecure daughter. Another father with fear of death who takes out his anger in the relationship with the family dog. A child who suffers harassment because he is not recognized by parents who expect something else from him, his own redemption. A grandmother who abducts a granddaughter with her childhood story to feel like an artist again. And all of them tacitly related.   Huéspedes returns to Spanish literature a realism that seeks to unmask social errors that are repeated over time.

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