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Canongate Books Ltd.
Canongate is an independent publisher: since 1973 we’ve worked to unearth and amplify the most vital, exciting voices we can find, wherever they come from, and we’ve published all kinds of books – thoughtful, upsetting, gripping, beatific, vulgar, chaste, unrepentant, life-changing . . . Along the way there have been landmarks of fiction – including Alasdair Gray’s masterpiece Lanark, and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, the best-ever-selling Booker winner – and non-fiction too. We’ve published an American president and a Guantanamo detainee; we’ve campaigned for causes we believe in and fought court cases to get our authors heard. And twice we’ve won Publisher of the Year. We’re still fiercely independent, and we’re as committed to unorthodox and innovative publishing as ever. Please find the link to our latest Rights Guide with digitial content here: Rights Guide and our Canons Guide here: Canons Guide
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September 2022The Weight of living on Earth
by David Toscana
Winner of the MARIO VARGAS LLOSA V BIENNIAL NOVEL PRIZE, 2023 Mario Vargas Llosa says "I have just read this novel by the Mexican writer David Toscana, which won the Biennial Novel Prize that bears my name, held in Guadalajara, and I think it is one of the most original texts published in recent years". "What is at stake in this remarkable text is humour. A strange and incandescent humour". "One of the original aspects of this book is that game by which, in the depths of the tragedies that the characters experience, there is always a light to which they can cling", "I think David Toscana has written one of the best novels in the language". La Nación, article by Mario Vargas LlosaWritten with the will to believe that imagination and desire are powerful forces for transforming reality, The Weight to Live on Earth puts us in front of an immense frieze of possibilities: life changes as we read, the author proposes, and this is how this group of characters turn the city of Monterrey into every possible scenario from Tsarist Russia to Soviet Russia, and a canteen will be a space station, an orange orchard will be a dacha, the Santa Catarina River will be the Neva, and an abandoned cable car will be the take-off platform. Sinopsis The news of the death of three Soviet cosmonauts on their return to Earth after 23 days on the Sailyut space station is the trigger for the delirious journey that Nikolai is about to embark on. Driven by his passion for reading, he changes his name to Nikolai Nikolayevich Pseldonov and his everyday life in the early 1970s in northern Mexico becomes a frieze that combines all the times and spaces of Russian literature: from Tolstoy to Bulgakov, from Chekhov to Akhmatova. Nicholas and his wife, along with a handful of strangers who join them along the way, fervently recreate scenes, conversations and stories from a wide range of novels, short stories and plays, but which, unlike the knights imitated by Don Quixote, star anti-heroes. Dozens or hundreds of stories that help us to piece together their own history and to sense their desolation in the face of a world in which they do not fit, a world they can only face with their imagination. Because, as the protagonist of The weight to live o earth says, “Life is the only infinite thing that has an end”. WHAT HAS BEEN SAID ABOUT THE AUTHOR’S WORK“Una obra que en España emparentaría de modo claro con el mejor Luis Landero, puesto que se sustenta en un mismo aliento o eje: el hiato entre realidad e irrealidad y el afán de los hombres por no resignarse a lo que son sin haber, al menos, intentado probar la suerte de lo que podrían ser; en suma: la redención en la búsqueda de lo imposible.” Ernesto Calabuig, El Cultural, El Mundo. “El humor, y en específico el negro, en las novelas de Toscana es legendario (…) logra unir la gran tradición de la picaresca en español con el universo metafísico de otro checo, Franz Kafka, para imponer un nuevo adjetivo atmosférico a la literatura mexicana: toscaniano o toscanesco.” Juan José de Ávila, El Confabulario, El Universal.
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FictionSeptember 2023Those who listen
by Diego SÁNCHEZ AGUILAR
Sinopsis : The closing ceremony of the Future Summit has an unexpected ending that puts the G7 presidents in an awkward position. While their advisors try to find out who has caused this problem and how to solve it, scenes from the lives of characters united by one fact are interspersed: they all hear a strange noise, the origin of which they cannot determine. This sound has side effects that will make them rethink their lives and their ethical convictions in a world that seems to be crumbling by the minute. When the future seems like a territory populated by ghosts, Diego Sánchez Aguilar explores, in Those who listen, all the forms of anxiety and fear that define contemporary society. And it will be difficult to emerge unscathed from his relentless enquiry. In Those who listen, Diego Sánchez Aguilar explores all the forms of Anxiety and Fear that define our contemporary society. “A thoughtful novel that avoids sermons: the best way to be a political novel” José María Pozuelo Yvancos . A novel that reminds us Thomas Pinchon, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, and the Bulgarian Guéorgui Gospodínov. And something to do as well with Vivir abajo by Gustavo Faverón. The second novel by Murcian writer Diego Sánchez Aguilar (first one, Factsbook) is an extensive book with a deep political, contemporary and current commitment. A novel about anxiety, family, care, madness, the planet, capitalism and language. It is also a novel about language, about the way in which language constructs the world and, above all, about what future is possible, thinkable or imaginable within the horizon of meanings of a language dominated by the ideology of marketing and economic profit and infinite growth. Diego Sánchez Aguilar shows, with humour and precision, how this language determines common sense, and defines what is reasonable and what is madness.
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May 2022The Book of our Absences
by Eduardo RUIZ SOSA
A journey through the scenes of the disappeared people in contemporary Mexico. Eduardo Ruiz Sosa : “A natural talent for the lyrical sentence.” Nadal Suau, El Cultural, El Mundo.A totally personal narrative form, similar to a Homeric poem, a long ancient song. Brilliant. Orsina is a theatre actress who becomes seriously ill. Her disappearance messes up the lives of those around her, especially that of Teoría Ponce and Róldenas, brothers who are heirs to a bankrupt printing press and who devote themselves to searching for her, confronting the atrocious world of the disappeared people. Between attempts to preserve the printing press, theatrical performances and a cast of characters as absurd as they are real, the novel takes us from the violent present to the maddening past of a historical figure marked by delirium and death: José de Gálvez, Visitor General of New Spain, incarnated in an old theatre actor who plays him in the last role of his life. The book Of Our Absences is a story about the disappearances in the north of Mexico, the violence of drug trafficking, the clandestine graves in the desert and the sierra. A journey of multiple voices and stories, of times that overlap and interweave. It is the intimate story of some absences, of mothers searching for their children, of spaces that have to be transformed in order to continue to exist.
