Hija del cielo begins in Gabaón, an isolated village on the northern coast, dominated by the Colegio de la Estricta Observancia de Gabaón, an institution that is simultaneously a school, orphanage, former seminary and quasi-monastery. It stands above the sea, populated by poor boys, more than sixty nuns and a small number of priests. Its […]
The central character is Flavio Guijarro, a restless, contradictory man who has spent most of his life trying on professions without becoming outstanding at any of them. He has been a draughtsman, musician, designer, interior decorator, psychology student, photographer, performer, writer and actor, but his most stable occupation is working as a waiter at his […]
Pajaritos preñados is a huge, feverish Canarian coming-of-age melodrama about Cathaysa, a sixteen-year-old girl in a poor, wet, gossip-poisoned barrio, and the men who turn her beauty, her body, her pregnancy, and her fear into public property. It wants to be a dialect novel, a rural epic, a feminist horror story, a family-curse novel, a […]
The Year of the Snake is a strange, darkly comic murder novel built out of smells, bodies, loneliness, female fear, bureaucracy, and reptile obsession. It alternates mainly between two storylines: the discovery of the corpse of Celeste Blum, a young architecture student, and the flight of Simón Sanders, the man who loved her and appears […]
Majareta unfolds as a polyphonic investigation into a man known almost exclusively through rumor, testimony, and aftermath. At its center is a school janitor—Leo Almada, often referred to as “el Majareta”—who becomes the object of intense public scrutiny after a violent incident involving students at the school where he has worked for decades. The novel […]
Maite takes place in San Sebastián in the summer of 1997, during the days surrounding the kidnapping and murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco by ETA. The novel follows Maite, a middle-aged woman who works as a translator, is married to Andoni, and lives a relatively quiet, orderly life shaped by routine, family ties, and a […]
This book was mostly written around the turn of the millennium, and García Márquez tried to finish it but his memory problems made it difficult and he ultimately abandoned it, as his children explain in the introduction. The decision to publish is ultimately against his wishes, but they say they don’t feel too much guilt […]
Two sisters. One is in a coma in a Berlin hospital, clinging to her life through a strange force that binds her to her sister. The other is in the south of Argentina, trapped in the atrocious fire that in March 2021 devastated nearly the entire population of El Hoyo. Together they belong to a […]
The book opens with the revelation that at the end of the story a little girl will die. From that moment on we follow Estela’s first-person account of the facts from the day she arrives to work as a housemaid in a rich household in Santiago to the present where she is locked up somewhere, trying […]
Told from a first-person voice that rapidly establishes itself as feminine (in Spanish, nouns and adjectives can be masculine or feminine), we follow the story of a girl trapped in a man’s body. Her name is, although it’s not mentioned until the end of act one approximately, Alejandro. She talks about her childhood in the 1980s in […]