Five novels for May

The days are inevitably and happily lengthening and the good weather invites you to spend more time outside the home, which does not have to be a problem for reading. May, full spring, invites you both to account for the pending books from the first quarter and to provide yourself with new readings for the remainder of the season and for the summer. Here are five new proposals for this month:

The forgotten novel in the engineer’s house, Soledad Puértolas

A Language Academic, this prolific author is still at the forefront with an enviable rate of production at 77 years old. With her new work, she pulls on one of literature’s classic hooks: the found manuscript. Through this narrative game of mirrors, Soledad Puértolas presents her particular tribute to fiction,

«A writer of young adult novels one day receives, from a friend, a manuscript found in a country house where an engineer lived for years. Immediately the text awakens curiosity and imagination, because everything in it seems touched by mystery. Who really is the author of that manuscript? What ties must he have with the owner of the house? Is everything true about a family’s history? “And where does the literary value of that narrative lie?” highlights the synopsis.

(Anagram, May 29)

The beasts, Clara Usón

Clara Usón (Barcelona, ​​1961) is from that lineage of writers who are not afraid of the porous space between reality and fiction. In her work she faces great characters or historical moments or she delves into the ignored circumstances of secondary ones. In The Daughters of the East, for example, she investigated the life of Ana Mladic, daughter of General Ratko Mladic, accused of genocide in the former Yugoslavia.

With Las fieras, Usón approaches our controversial recent past and touches on the leaden years of ETA and the GAL. It does so through two parallel stories, real and fictional: that of Idoia López Riaño, the Tigress, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorists of ETA, and the young Miren, a teenager who tries to lead a normal life in a family whose father is related to the dirty war of the GAL.

(Seix Barral, May 15)

Mother with an atomic heart, Agustín Fernández Mallo

We continue in Seix Barral, with another of its reference authors. The physicist and creator of the Nocilla Project is used to changing registers and surprising with each of his works, without ever losing his most characteristic features. The proposal of his new novel is exceptional in his work: a book with a strong autobiographical component narrated with simplicity.

The story, under a title that refers to a Pink Floyd album, starts with a curious premise: A veterinarian who travels to the United States in the 70s to bring twenty cows to Spain. That veterinarian is the father of the author who, along with his mother and the rest of the family, stars in this book.

(Seix Barral, May 8)

They will come to arrest me at midnight, Tahir Hamut Izguil

The Uyghurs are an ethnic group of Muslim origin who have lived in northwest China since the 9th century and were recently harassed by the communist government. The repression has especially affected members of culture such as Tahir Hamut Izguil, a poet and filmmaker who was already detained, tortured and imprisoned for three years in a re-education camp in the 90s.

They will come to arrest me at midnight is the testimony of the flight from China of the author and his family and a denunciation of the harassment of Uyghurs and, in general, minorities in totalitarian regimes.

(Asteroid Books, May 27)

Specters, Vernon Lee

We close this selection with the reissue of a horror and mystery classic. Vernon Lee was Violet Page during her lifetime, a cultured and exceptional woman who until her death in 1935 cultivated the fantasy genre under the aforementioned pseudonym.

The British introduces us to Victorian Gothic through objects such as a cursed score that obsesses a young man to the point of alienation or a crucifix of unknown powers that sickens tourists and pilgrims. In this selection, notes the Duomo publishing house, «Vernon Lee insinuates himself into the twilight of souls, in a game of waiting and ambiguity that pushes his protagonists to the brink of madness. Four sinister stories to immerse yourself in the abyss of the Self. And get lost among the ruins of the unconscious.

(Duomo, May 6)